


All My Underdogs

by weary_kind



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: After that it's a free for all, Albus Dumbledore Bashing, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bad Friends, Do-Over, Dubious Morality, F/M, For real this story deals with a sexual assault, Found Family, Good Tom Riddle, Love potions are evil, M/M, Manipulative Albus Dumbledore, Molly Weasley Bashing, Ron Weasley Bashing, Seriously there was so much negligence, That one's totally about Tom, and people ignoring how serious that is, but NOT between Harry/Tom, but not time travel, but you can't take the Dark Lord out of the boy, compliant up to the first visit to Diagon Alley, very much a non-con moment, you can take the boy out of the Dark Lord
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-18 01:08:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 57,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28983876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weary_kind/pseuds/weary_kind
Summary: Following the shopping trip to Diagon Alley, after Hagrid returned him to his relatives' home, Harry is faced with a moment of clarity.He can leave. There's finally somewhere to go where his family can't touch him.Harry makes the journey back to Diagon Alley alone and changes (without even knowing it) the course of the rest of his life. Unfortunately, his life has already been planned out for him beyond what he could have imagined.... Some people might not be happy that he's messing that up.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Tom Riddle, Harry Potter/Voldemort
Comments: 200
Kudos: 969





	1. SUMMER BEFORE FIRST YEAR

**Author's Note:**

> **This story will contain world-building, and deals with some pretty serious situations (READ THE TAGS). Exercise caution and self-discretion if that is not your cup of tea.**

By the time Hagrid had tapped on the bricks to open the entrance to Diagon Alley, Harry thought he was dreaming. Well, he’d considered it at least. It was either a dream, or some kind of magical fairytale.

Two things here: One, he had never been aware he was dreaming while it was still happening; and Two, he didn’t really believe in fairytales.

But everything felt very real. Warmth, cold, the wind, the grit under his fingers as he touched the bricks. And the people bumping into him as he followed behind the giant. He could feel that. He could feel all of it.

The goblins kind of scared him though. For a second, he thought that if this was a dream then it might be a nightmare. But no. The goblins led to gold. He had gold. Not the paper bank notes he had seen with Uncle Vernon. But actual gold!

One of the goblins, the one who took him down to the vaults gave him a fancy looking card on his way out. “You ask for Griphook when you return, young Master Potter. I alone oversee the Potter accounts.”

He barely had the composure or understanding to respond, but he stuttered out a simple “O-Okay,” and pocketed the card.

The grin that stretched across the goblin’s face was just as sinister and scary as he imagined it would be. 

But he had money now, money to buy things. He had never been able to buy things before, not really. So, he deferred to Hagrid for most of the purchases. At least the man seemed to know what things Harry would be needing for his new school.

Books, he was getting books. Of course they were school books, but he had never heard of these subjects before and it was all new and exciting. In fact, he had never heard of _any_ of the subjects that he saw in the bookstore. Back in his school, he had been so happy when he learned that he could borrow any of the books they had. He had immediately taken advantage of it and soaked everything up like a sponge.

He hadn’t been able to take the dictionaries home though, so he taught himself the big words while he was in school. He wondered if there would be big words in the magic books too. He wondered if there would be a dictionary.

And then the pet store… it was amazing! And very crowded. Hagrid seemed to love it in there, he knew the person who worked in the store so Harry took advantage of his distraction to wander towards the back. They had snakes. Harry wondered if he could talk to these ones like he talked to the one from the zoo.

And he could, he was so happy. But they didn’t seem to want to talk to him. Two of them didn’t at least. There were only three, and it was the third one that spoke to him the most, which wasn’t saying much.

It was a pretty grey and black snake, and it seemed happy enough to stay coiled in a tight ball with his head resting just on top. His name was Keziah and Harry thought he would have talked to him longer, but Hagrid found him.

“Come on then Harry, I have a gift for you.” He held up a snowy white owl that had an eerily intelligent look in her eyes as she studied him. It was the same way Keziah looked at him. He didn’t want to test it out with everybody around, but he wondered if people could talk to owls the same way they could talk to snakes.

The wand and robes portion of his trip were enough to make Harry realize that Hagrid had been right when he said people would know his name. Both the wand maker and the seamstress were kind about it, but they definitely knew him.

He wasn’t sure he liked that, honestly. These people were nice, but they didn’t _know_ him if he didn’t know them. Still, this was his new secret world. He needed people to like him here so they wouldn’t send him away. The seamstress gave him a card on his way out, just like the goblin had, so Harry figured at least she seemed to like him well enough.

As Hagrid took him around the shopping area, Harry’s thoughts had solidified into a firm and final grasp on this new place being a reality. And what was even better about it, it was a secret reality. His aunt and uncle wouldn’t be able to get to the alley on their own, Hagrid said muggles couldn’t.

He had magic, he was a wizard, and the muggles couldn’t follow him into the Wizarding World.

Aside from the pet store, his favorite place they went to was the trunk store. He needed a school one, for sure. But there are whole displays of others.

The shop was cluttered, much like the wand shop had been. But it was filled with so many different trunks it was hard to know where to begin.

Once again, Hagrid left him in the store. But Harry was more than fine with that. There was a young man watching him that he realized was a store worker when he came over to introduce himself. His name was Jasper, and he was nice enough not to rush Harry, or get annoyed by all of his questions.

Harry learned that some of the trunks were more expensive than others, but the one he needed for school wasn’t too much. Pretty standard is what Jasper told him. But he was curious why the other ones cost more. The salesman directs his attention to the money bag he has his galleons in.

“You have a small looking bag for the amount of money you’re carrying around,” Jasper told him.

Harry was confused. “You know how much money I am carrying?”

“No,” the man laughed back. “But that bag doesn’t look big enough if you’re only looking at the outside, does it?”

He supposes that was true. He’d noticed it before, but didn’t think to ask.

“It’s the same thing with the trunks. Some are just your regular trunk. Nothing special. But some,” and now Jasper led him over to another section. “Some are enchanted to be bigger on the inside. The same concept as that bag you carry.”

“Wow.” Harry was honestly impressed. Magic was wonderful so far, but he liked this idea a lot. “How big can they go?”

He got a smile for that, “How much money do you want to spend? It’s really about that. The bigger ones, the ones that are made for living in cost more, obviously. But there’s some that can just be like a big closet for some extra space.”

“People live in trunks?”

“Well, not many. Most people prefer to have an actual house. But they use the same expanding and enlargement charms on their houses that the trunks do.”

“And you can… go to the toilet in there?”

“Yes, if it’s the ones made to be a home.”

“But, how…”

That seemed to tickle Jasper even more, “Magic,” was the cryptic reply.

When Hagrid came back Harry had already purchased his school trunk. He brought out the rest of the purchases and showed Harry how to shrink it all down to fit inside, and explained how to make it back to normal size when Harry needed it.

Jasper had already told him that the trunk itself could shrink as well, without any damage to what was inside. But Hagrid didn’t show him that.

At least the big man showed him how to do a featherlight charm to make it easier to drag behind. And he took Harry to get some supper at The Leaky Cauldron, which was wonderful because Harry hadn’t eaten since the morning before.

Something he was hoping wouldn’t happen though, Hagrid deposited him back in front of the Dursley’s house. Sure, he made sure Harry would know to be on the train platform on the right day and time, but he was really hoping he wouldn’t have to go back to the muggle world for a while.

Uncle Vernon was more than angry with Harry once he was alone again. Apparently, they’d made it back from their ‘vacation’ spot.

Aunt Petunia gave him a nasty look and repeated her accusations that he was a ‘freak’ when she saw the trunk with Hogwarts supplies inside. Dudley had learned nothing from the tail incident and immediately tried to open the trunk and rifle through everything. Harry shrunk it really quick before he could.

It was probably that action, and the fact that he’d brought in his new owl that led to what happened next.

They lock him in the cupboard with no supper. But at least Uncle Vernon had only grabbed his arm to toss him inside. It was always worse when the man grabbed his neck.

Harry thought back to the beef stew he’d had at The Leaky Cauldron. It had been so good, but it was probably the last good meal he would have until he left. He doesn’t want to stay, but the date Hagrid gave him for the train wasn’t too far away.

Still, he had the whole month of August to get through.

He lasts another week.

It’s not right. He knows the way they treat him isn’t right. It’s just that up until now, he had never thought there was a viable means of escape.

But…. The Dursley’s cannot follow him into the Wizarding world… they can’t make him come back. He made dinner one night, then said he had to let the owl out to catch dinner. Uncle Vernon shouted, the way he always shouted, that Harry better not bring it back in the house if he knew what was good for him.

That’s okay. Harry can do the vile man one better. Harry won’t be coming back in the house either.

He felt some resistance when he tried to leave the back garden. Something that made his hands shake and stomach twist until he thought he was going to retch up the dinner that he didn’t even get to eat.

But Harry knows what fear is. And he’s forced himself to walk towards enough ‘punishments’ from his uncle that he knows how to push past it. Also, he knows that if he stays in that house, there will only be more pain. More hunger. More cold nights in the cupboard. He set his jaw firmly and pushed through the odd sensation.

Once he was out onto the neighbors back garden, he found that he could breathe easier. And then he starts walking. Around their neighbor’s home, out onto the street… The further away he got, the better he felt. By the time he made it six streets away, his hands had stopped shaking.

And then he runs.

He took nothing but the clothes on his back and the wand in his pocket. And of course, the shrunken trunk in his other pocket. Hedwig flies in the sky above him. 

He has no money for a cab ride, but he makes decent time getting into the city proper. Well, it’s decent time considering he can only go as fast as his legs will let him.

From there he locates the train station, the thing that will take him into London. He knows it's supposed to cost money to use it, but he doesn't have any of that. Not muggle money at least. No one sees him ducking under the rails or boarding the train that states London is it's destination. No one comes to check on his presence once the train takes off either. 

He sort of remembers the way to the The Leaky Cauldron, though it takes a few hours. Most people have gone to sleep by now probably since there aren't many on the streets. But eventually he finds the entrance, and goes through to the alleyway in the back. Its easy enough to pull over a crate to stand on, tapping the same bricks he’d seen from Hagrid earlier. It works. So now he knows he can get in and out when he wants.

He takes a room, surprising the bartender, who looks shocked at the request but recognizes him from earlier and allows it anyway. And then he orders a meal. Beef stew. It tastes like heaven, just like he’d remembered. The bartender says he supposes Harry wants some butter beer to go with the food.

Harry doesn’t know what that is. But he’d be grateful to the man for some water if he could.

The first thing Harry does when he gets up the next morning, after eating a breakfast that he didn’t have to cook, is make sure Hedwig is happy on her perch. He hadn’t been able to bring her cage before, but the room came with a branch stand and she’d made use of it almost immediately.

The second thing he does… is go back to the trunk store.

This time he finds out what each trunk has to offer. In detail. Jasper was there again, and he is happy to show Harry brochures on each. There are some with whole bedroom spaces in them that he thinks are nice, they’re bigger than even Dudley’ room. And some that have multiple rooms. Some that have kitchens. Some that have bathrooms. Even one with a fireplace.

Just like Jasper had promised, there are trunks that are in fact, whole houses.

He gets that this whole thing is magic…. But he doesn’t actually _get_ it. “Exactly how can a _trunk_ have a fireplace? And a toilet? And running water?....”

Jasper is just as amused with Harry as he was a week ago. “There’s whole libraries on the logistics of it all,” is what he tells him.

Harry keeps coming back to one trunk in particular. Jasper opens it up and shows him the enchantment for “stairs” and down they go. It’s a decently lit alcove with a door. Next to the door is a post box that will collect any mail delivered by owl for him if he wishes.

If an owl lands on the trunk with the letter, it is immediately deposited inside for Harry upon his return or exit.

Jasper opens the door. 

Inside is a very spacious open area immediately on the left. He’s pretty sure it’s the size of the whole downstairs of the Dursley’s house if there were no walls. He can see the fireplace along the far side wall, which is cool. To his right is a smaller nook area and walk-in kitchen. Beyond that is a hallway that leads to a bathroom on the right, a bedroom on the left, and at the end of the hall, another large bedroom.

He learns that the flooring, doors, walls, windows, fixtures… these are all up to the buyer’s selection and can be modified to fit to their tastes. Some are expensive, some are not. There’re more brochures on that. And there’s even _more_ brochures on the furniture selection.

“Assuming the young Master Potter doesn’t have his own yet,” is what Jasper says.

All of it, able to shrink down to the size of his pocket without harming anything inside. Even Hedwig? Even that. Magic is amazing. 

He wants this one.

The man conjures a quick set of chairs and table in the front room and sets several rolls of parchments and papers in front of him. 

He does like the feel of carpet under his feet but also likes the idea of hardwood. It’s got a nice shine to it, and Harry figures it will be much easier to keep clean than the carpet his aunt has. Rugs are good though. He selects several of those in faded rust and beige colors.

A light, warm beige for the walls suits him as well. Soft lighting, brick fireplace. Modern looking kitchen with a circular dining table in the nook area. Deep leather couch with dark mahogany coffee and console tables.

He moves the door to the smaller bedroom into the living area instead of the hallway and selects French doors.

The most amazing thing is that every new selection brings a physical change to the area around him. He can see all of it as soon as he decides on something.

Inside the library, he covers most of the open wall space with shelves. Another leather sofa for the room on one side, and a mahogany desk on the other side to match the living room furniture. The best part about the room is the desk can be bigger or smaller to fit his wishes. Which is good because at eleven years old, he doubts his feet will reach the floor sitting at a full-sized desk.

He’ll have to start his book collection soon. And this time, he won’t have to give the books back to the school library. And no one will take them away from him, because Dudley will never know about them.

For his bedroom, the large one in the back, he selects cool colors. Light blues, soft greens. Something light, and airy, and clean looking is what he asked for. He will have an actual bed. His own bed. He swears he doesn’t need anything huge, but a queen is what Jasper recommends so he goes with that.

The bathroom gets a similar treatment. Tile floors in a deep slate color, and lighter hued accents for the stone sink area by the door that pair nicely with the separate toilet closet, tile shower, and clawfoot tub in the back.

Linens will be needed. But that is also covered in the many and assorted pamphlets. Sheets, duvets, blankets, towels. All there.

He supposes he could get some more clothes now to fill up the shelves in the bedroom closet.

By the end of the selection, he can purchase all of it for the _low_ cost of 12,319 galleons, 14 sickles, and 28 knuts.

He doesn’t have that much on him.

“You can use your Heir ring,” Jasper points out. But he doesn’t have one of those either, and he doesn’t even know what it is.

When he tells this to the salesman, he watches a peculiar look cross the mans face before he abruptly stands up and asks Harry to follow him out. 

Jasper walks him all the way over to Gringotts. He doesn’t appear at all ashamed to be abandoning his coworker to the large crowd of parents and children filling the store now. Harry supposes they had been down there for quite a bit of time already.

The goblin, what was his name… Griphook.

He and Jasper find Griphook, looking the same as he did a week ago, and the short, scary creature leads them into a private office down the hall. 

At first the goblin looks at them in disbelief. Of course there is an Heir ring. How odd that Harry is not in possession of it already.

No matter, that will be resolved by the end of the day.

“And what exactly am I getting access to?” Harry asked. It was easier to be a bit more confident with Jasper there. If he’d been alone, he might have been too scared to form a sentence.

“You are the heir to the Potter estate, and as the last living relative any property that belongs to the Potter family is now yours.” Griphook explains.

He doesn’t seem so scary when he’s explaining it. But he does look across to Jasper every now and then with an odd tilt to his head. As though Harry has asked him a particularly dumb question.

But it becomes apparent for all in the room that Harry is quite unknowledgeable about most of the intricacies of money and inheritance rights in the Wizarding World.

“Perhaps a simple blood test to start us out…” Griphook offers. “It is clear to me you are Harry Potter, but a blood test will confirm your vaults on a parchment. Something you can take with you when you leave.”

Harry looks over to Jasper and gets an encouraging nod. “Okay.”

His finger gets a little prick for some blood. It stings for a moment, but not much.

“One drop precisely here, please.”

Harry obeys and sees a parchment lift up from the desk, hovering in the air as words start to appear in a flowing and curling, deep black ink.

**Vault Access Query Blood Test**

**Performed: 8 August 1991**

**Subject: Harry James Potter**

**Officiated: Griphook, Chief Goblin of the Potter Estate**

**Witnesses: Jasper Owens, acquaintance to the subject**

**Findings: Three vaults**

**Heir to the Potter Family Vault – Access provided to the Executer of the Estate (Albus** **Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore** **)**

**Owner of the Potter Trust Vault – Access provided to the Named Owner (Harry James Potter)**

**Heir to the Black Family Vault - Access provided to the Executer of the Estate (Albus** **Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore)**

“I don’t know who this is.” Harry pointed to the name of the Executer of the Estate. “Hagrid mentioned him, said he was the headmaster, but I don’t know him.”

“As the executer, he is the wizard appointed as your guardian in all legal, financial, and health matters,” Griphook tells him. “He has unrestricted access to both family vaults that belong to you.”

Jasper adds that Albus Dumbledore is indeed the headmaster of the school Harry will be going to in less than a month.

“But why would the headmaster of a school I only just heard about be the owner of my vaults?”

That question doesn’t get an answer.

“So, I can’t use the money inside?”

Griphook has a brief look of pity, if one could imagine such a look on a goblin’s face. “Not the family vaults, not until you reach seventeen years of age and are declared an adult in the Wizarding World. Same for the properties attached to the Family Vaults.”

"There's properties?"

And yes, there were several properties included in both the Potter and Black estates. Given that Harry can't use them just yet, he set them to the back of his mind to look at later. Griphook promised to give him a full account listing before he left.

So that makes a number of properties and two vaults that he can't use. But… he can absolutely access the trust vault in his name. That was the one Griphook had shown him the week before. The one with all the gold. 

“Will there be enough to purchase the trunk?”

The goblin across from him let out a loud cackle. “The amount in that vault should see you comfortably into your fiftieth year without ever needing to touch the others.”

And the heir ring can be used to cover the purchases by supplying the funds directly from the trust vault. As that was its only avenue to draw from. “When you have reached the majority age, you will receive the Lord rings to access the Potter and Black family vaults.”

Griphook has more to speak to Harry about, but Jasper offers to go collect the trunk and deliver it to him in the bank. The purchase can be settled then.

As soon as he is out of the office, Griphook brings out more parchments.

It’s a daunting stack of bank statements upon bank statements. They record the monthly totals for the nearly the last ten years.

Harry is only eleven. He doesn’t know exactly what he is looking at or why it’s important.

“More of a concrete thinker aren’t you.” Griphook muses. “Well, this should be easy. Numbers are the most concrete thing there is.”

He shows Harry the bottom line in the latest statements. And actually, the number is beyond Harry’s comprehension for a moment.

“Yes, yes. You are a very wealthy young wizard. Congratulations. It is the decrease in amounts I would like you to draw your attention to. See the first statements.” A quick shuffle of the papers and Griphook has the oldest statement on top.

Then he brings the latest statement to sit beside it. 

The numbers are still huge, but Harry does the math quickly in his head. “But that’s… that’s over a million?”

He gets a grim nod. “Yes. And so the question to ask, where has your money been going? With this amount, I have to assume you have been living a life of luxury for these last eleven years. However, based on your stature and current attire, I am not so sure.”

Harry explains his upbringing. A little. There’s absolutely no reason to go into details about the painful moments. And besides, no one believed him before.

Before they can look into the disappearance of the funds, Jasper returns and they tour the trunk together.

Griphook invites himself to join them. He’s ruthless in his inspection. Demands the water heat up faster. That the fireplace be easily turned on and off with a spoken charm. That the closet in the master bedroom have a clothing press and steamer added.

Harry asks for one more modification. A tree. In the main room.

They both give him odd looks.

Actually, two trees.

On either side of the fireplace wall.

Harry explains one is for Hedwig. “You did say she would be fine in here if I shrunk it down.”

“…Yes.”

“Okay then, I want her to have a tree.”

Jasper makes the adjustment quickly before asking “What’s the other one for?”

Harry has plans for a snake. He notices the goblin and the older wizard share a look.

“Well then,” Jasper clears his throat. “I suggest the owl’s tree have less of the leaves. I would imagine a snake might appreciate them more.”

Griphook didn’t like that idea so much. “Don’t make it look uneven!”

Apparently, goblins are very serious about interior design. In fact, he’s a little disgusted with the lack of gold finishing on things. Harry settles into the corner of the couch to watch, feet tucked under him and a smile on his face.

Jasper adds the trees. They are real. But sustained entirely of their own charm.

They both walk Harry through authorizing purchases with his ring.

Jasper addresses Harry back in the office before he takes his leave. “Am I understanding correctly that you wish to reside solely within this trunk? And not inside of another building?”

Harry does, yes.

“That is possible.” And isn’t that a relief? “Here or in the muggle world?”

“Umm…either? I think I would like it better here…” But he doesn’t know. How is he supposed to know? And can he just leave his trunk somewhere? What if someone finds it? What if they throw it in a dump? He looks back up to Jasper. “Which do you think is better?”

But Griphook interrupts. “We will see to that in a bit Heir Potter.”

Jasper shares another look with the goblin, but this time he looks a little put off, a little angry. “He needs assistance. You know he does,” he hisses out.

“Yes,” came the smooth reply. “And we will provide it.”

“I can take him to get the essentials. I won’t mention his name.”

After watching the man make promises to Griphook, and what sounds like an official sort of _vow_ , Harry decides he would like Jasper to stay for the duration.

“Very well,” is the begrudging response. 

As for the placement of the trunk... anywhere really. Though, it is _strongly_ advised that Harry uses invisibility and repelling charms on it prior to use. And that he selects an area without a lot of foot traffic.

And finally, once they are back upstairs from Harry’s new home, Griphook returns to his desk and they refocus on the vault statements.

Another quick prick of his finger brings up another floating parchment. The words begin to fill the sheet, alerting them that there are several streams of funds exiting the vaults each month.

**Vernon and Petunia Dursley = 800 Galleons**

Withdrawn to Date: 92,800 Galleons

**OP Society = 2,500 Galleons**

Withdrawn to Date: 290,000 Galleons

**Molly Weasley = 1000 Galleons (additional 10,000 Galleons every 1 st of January)**

Withdrawn to Date: 206,000 Galleons

**Ministry of Magic Dark Arts Oversight Committee = 500 Galleons**

Withdrawn to Date: 58,000 Galleons

**Albus Dumbledore = 500 Galleons (additional 10,000 Galleons every 1 st of January)**

Withdrawn to Date: 148,000 Galleons

**Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry = 2,500 Galleons**

Withdrawn to Date: 290,000 Galleons

This doesn’t reflect the current month of August’s reports, that will be computed at the end of the month.

Jasper was more unsettled than Harry. Odd, since it wasn’t his money.

“Is there surviving family that is drawing on these accounts?” Jasper asks. “This Molly Weasley… is she family? I remember a Percy Weasley from school I think, but not a Molly.”

Harry shakes his head back. “No. I’ve never heard of her.”

“The Dursley’s are a muggle family, the relatives you spoke of earlier?” Harry nods back and the goblin continues. “The Weasleys are a wizarding family. Though their relation to you is unknown. As it seems, even to yourself.”

Shock, outrage, disgust… Jasper’s face has it all. It didn’t really touch Harry, though.

He had seen the total numbers. Of both family vaults and the trust vault. If the worst these people, whoever they were, could do in nine years’ time was to siphon about a million away, he could sacrifice the next six years until he reached his majority age.

Griphook assured him he would gladly shut down all outward flows at that time. For now, he would monitor it. If additional funds were extracted, he would send the notice to Harry by mail.

With his morning officially having gotten away from him, Griphook declared himself free for the rest of the day and journeyed out to Diagon Alley with Harry and Jasper to assist with shopping.

And he was thankful for that. The two men, well one man and one goblin, helped him secure food for his kitchen. Both had been shocked when he let them know he’d been cooking meals for the Dursleys for years. He already had standard cooking and dinner ware in the kitchen, but he purchased some of the finer pots that he saw. He’d never thought he’d get a chance to use them before, and they _did_ look really nice.

Though Harry had been worried since it had been a whole week, Keziah was indeed still at that pet store when they ventured in. Griphook did not join them inside. They were in and out within minutes and the goblin guarded the trunk while Harry and Jasper went inside to store his shopping and get the snake settled in his new tree.

Harry has a quick conversation with his new snake friend about eating owls (forbidden), where to get his water bowl, and to ask how often he required food.

Jasper had witnessed it all and explained that, “Harry, just don’t… don’t let anyone else know that you can talk to snakes, okay? It’s not a common gift in the Wizarding World. People won’t like it.”

He spent well over 5,000 Galleons in the bookstore, even making several purchases from the shadowy area in the back that Hagrid had warned him away from the week before.

Jasper snorted at the selection though and offered to show them to a store on Knockturn Alley that had a more “well-rounded” selection. Harry spent a lot of money there too. The goblin merely raised his eyebrow at the selection, but didn’t say anything against it beyond that he should endeavor to keep those particular books far away from prying eyes.

It seemed there were going to be a good number of things that he should ‘keep secret.’ Even if this _was_ the Wizarding World. That’s okay, he’s had plenty of practice with that already. At least the two men with him didn’t seem to be alarmed by anything. 

And there was the new clothing. His muggle clothes, as Griphook called them would make him stand out in the magical world. And not in a good way. Jasper agreed. They found the same seamstress and she was overjoyed at his return. When Harry told her not to worry about the cost, she smiled even wider. Griphook was not amused.

Parchment and ink, journals and quills. Candles and toiletries, extra pillows and blankets. Harry was slightly overwhelmed.

It had been a full day of shopping and the pile of bags and parcels in his living room had grown pretty big. At least he would have something to do later as he put it all away.

Jasper led them to an abandoned alleyway behind the store where he worked and let Harry know that he could keep the trunk there if he wanted to. Honestly? He didn’t have any better ideas, so it seemed good enough for now.

Griphook asks if he’s sure this is safe enough and Jasper asks if the goblin can sense any other trunks nearby.

He can’t.

Which is interesting because when Jasper waves his wand to cancel the disillusionment charm on the area, another trunk is sitting right there. It’s Jasper’ own. When they’re both ready to turn in for the night, he’ll ward the area. And he’ll show Harry how to do it.

But first, Harry needs Hedwig and his belongings from The Leaky Cauldron. It could be a quick affair, but as it’s growing late in the afternoon, kicking into the evening, they decide dinner at the inn might be a good idea.

And that is where Griphook leaves them. He has his own food to see to and has had enough social interaction with wizards for one day. He sounds grumpy, but Harry is fairly sure he enjoyed himself for at least some of their outing.

Jasper gives the farewell: “May your gold continue to grow.”

Griphook seems to appreciate it. That last sneer is slightly less grotesque than the previous ones. 

The goblin has also left a large number of statements and records in Harry’s library/study to get through. For all that he shrunk the height of his new desk, the width of it remained. And it’s covered. That should be fun.

“Hey Jasper,” Harry asks as they’re tucking into their food. “Why did you help me today?”

Jasper sets his spoon down and gives Harry a serious look. “You’re an orphan, right? Well, so am I, more or less.”

“What does more or less mean?”

“It means my father is a wizard, but my mother was a muggle. She died when I was four. I was placed in a home that didn’t want me until I was eleven and got my letter for Hogwarts. I guess, you remind me of me,” he said with a shrug. “You’re in a better position than me though. You have vaults to live off of. I didn’t have that.”

He doesn’t sound bitter, just telling it like it is. “Is your father…?”

“Alive? Yeah.” And there _was_ a hint of bitterness in that response. “He’s not interested in an illegitimate kid from a muggle though. So, I work. And I read. I like learning magic, as much of it as I can. Guess that’s the Ravenclaw in me.”

Harry doesn’t know about the houses at Hogwarts, but Jasper agrees to show him when they’re done.

Still, he has more questions. “How did you know? That I would need help.”

That got an unflattering snort. “Your clothing. When you first came in last week, you were wearing a flannel and tee that were at least five sizes too big and definitely from the muggle world. Today you wore a pullover, but even that and your jeans were too worn out. It made it look like no one was helping you. And I remember wishing someone had been there to help me.

“Look, When you get to the school, you’re going to be surrounded by kids who’ve grown up with this their whole life. They’re not going to have the same shock and awe moment that you will because to them, it’s just everyday life. So, the idea of helping you understand things probably wont even cross their minds.

“And there’s some of them who…. Well, they don’t really like that some of us come from muggles. The Wizarding World of Britain is completely submerged in a class war. Even though most people don’t talk about it. If you have “muggle” blood they see that as you being somehow beneath them.

“Don’t let yourself get caught up in it, you don’t want that kind of trouble. Just remember that in six years, you will wear two Lordship rings on your hand, and control two seats on the Wizengamot.”

More new words for Harry to learn. “What’s the Wizengamot?”

Jasper laughed, “Oh Harry, you’ve got so much to learn.”

“I know,” he groaned, thumping his head down on the table.

Harry spends the next three weeks learning as much as he can. In the evenings, Jasper usually comes round for supper and they go over what he thinks will help Harry out for the upcoming year in Hogwarts.

Beyond going out for additional potion supplies (more than the basic Hagrid had seen to), it’s agreed that Harry should try and stay off the streets as much as possible. He’s had his hair and eyes seen to, thankful that he didn’t need to fear losing or cracking a pair of glasses again, and that his hair was no longer an unruly mess on his head.

And he and Jasper went food shopping twice more over those weeks. The older boy assured him that Hogwarts would provide as much food as he wanted. But Harry wanted to be sure just in case. Now that he knew he could have food whenever he wanted, it was hard to keep from stocking it up.

But he did learn some charms, which was nice. By the end of the three weeks, Harry could levitate his trunk to wherever he wanted it. And other objects too, it wasn’t just the trunk. But he learned how to shrink it and enlarge it without a second thought. How to hear and see the sights and sounds going on outside while he was inside. And how to conceal it, some wards to repel others. Some locking-out and silencing charms.

Jasper told him about the dorms at the school, but that there were drapes on the beds for privacy. So all Harry needed to do was put the other trunk, the one he got with Hagrid out at the end of his bed, “lock” and silence the bed, put the new one _on_ the bed, and go inside.

“Best to get an alarm clock if you’re a heavy sleeper,” Jasper had warned. 

The day before he was due to leave for the train station (that Jasper told him about, because otherwise he seriously doubted he would have understood how to get there from inside the Wizarding World) the salesman took the day off work and went into muggle London with Harry. 

They stuffed themselves at McDonalds. Saw a film in the theatre and stuffed themselves again on popcorn, extra butter, and went on a little shopping spree for Harry.

He’d pulled enough money out, converted to muggle currency, and picked up a few muggle comforts, clothes, books, and that alarm clock.

Before they went back to their “homes” Jasper showed him the train station one more time from the muggle side. He wouldn’t be going through that entrance, but still. It was good to know that the entrance was hidden from being seen by muggles, especially since platform 9 ¾ didn’t rightly exist in their world. 


	2. FIRST YEAR AT HOGWARTS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was going to wait to post.... but it was ready to go. Enjoy the quick update! Chapters will go up as soon as my internal editing is finished (no beta). Hopefully no more than a week in between, and probably more frequent than that.

Harry was happy he had taken Jasper’s advice and come to the train station early. It was a madhouse.

Another way to put it: Chaos.

He sincerely hated the crowd and made short work of slipping by the people who were already pushing around to get inside. Given that most of the other kids were still on the platform, he found an empty compartment in the very back and closed the door behind him.

Jasper had taught him the repelling charms, and the lock and silencing charms for the trunks, but it was good practice to see if they worked on the train box as well. They should, but he’d only used them for a few weeks.

None of the doors physically locked, but he put up the charms and wards anyways. Then drew the curtains down for good measure. For the window showing the platform, he left enough room in the curtain to be able to look out and watch the gaggle of parents with their children.

Some of them looked more ‘upper society’ than others. He noticed quickly the father and son with the shocking blonde hair. Almost white. There was a word for that, but he didn’t remember.

Anyways, the boy looked young and he figured this was another first year, like himself. He seemed a bit hesitant, almost scared. Though he hid it quickly enough. It was a halfway decent mask, but Harry saw through it.

He shifted his attention to another boy who had absolutely no mask whatsoever. This one stood out because he was a bit taller than the others. Though he still looked quite young. Harry pegged him for another first year based on the look of absolute terror on his face. Also, he was clutching a toad to his chest like his life depended on it, while a man dressed in a (butler’s?) uniform directed him to the train. 

He had a big trolley filled with trunks and such that the butler was pushing along for him, and Harry took a moment to wonder why they didn’t all just shrink it down like he had. Really, the platform would be far less crowded without all the clutter.

Even the first boy, the blonde, had his trunks normal size, though they were floating behind him instead of stacked on a clunky trolley.

Hmmm. Perhaps that was on purpose. The floating trunks _did_ create a nice barrier from the rest of the people getting too close.

Then again, no. Without having to keep track of luggage, Harry had been able to slip around the people easily and quickly. He preferred that advantage over a possible shield.

Looking over the crowd, he found it pretty easy after that to spot the other first years. The older kids were very obvious… they were _older._ But the rest of the young ones either looked at the train with happiness or nervousness.

It was the nervous ones that he latched on to.

There was a girl with bushy hair just a shade off of Jaspers. She had her parents with her, and despite her own look of apprehension, it was her parents that he focused on. They were almost melded together, and had a slight jumpiness around the rest of the families. Probably muggles.

Jasper had explained that muggle parents were invited into the Wizarding World due to their child’s involvement. Some took to it, but most were a split between fear and disapproval.

Then there were the red-headed family that caught his attention. Mostly it was the hair, it was more like orange, and definitely stood out in the crowd. Also, they were tall and two of them were clearly twins. But all three of them looked pretty comfortable with things, and they weren’t young.

They also weren’t accompanied by their parents. But wait… ah, there. An older man, probably their father, came over to give them hugs and what looked like a last-minute warning before they shuffled their luggage onto the train. 

They looked like a lot of energy. If his wards didn’t hold, Harry hoped they didn’t sit with him regardless.

It took a good hour and then some, but the kids were mostly boarded and several of the parents had already left. Certainly those two muggle parents he’d noticed earlier were already gone.

After the final boarding call whistled out, he caught sight of a last-minute family rushing through the entrance from the muggle world that Jasper showed him the day before.

It was a plump woman with a round-faced boy and little girl. Same shocking red hair as the one’s he’d seen earlier.

It was obviously a mother with her son and daughter. Like so many others. Aside from the tall boy with the toad, he hadn’t seen many without a parent on the platform. 

He watched the woman look around desperately for a few minutes before shaking her head and ushering her son on the train. The man who’d been with the tall twin boys earlier came rushing over to give the young boy a final hug.

Well, then. They must be related. Big family to all be in Hogwarts together, and the red hair must run in the family if the siblings are any indication. But he noticed the girl didn’t board with her brother, too young now that he thought about it. 

No one tried to get in his compartment. It could be that the train was big enough that no one needed the space, but he hoped it was the wards. And since he knew it would take several hours for the train to arrive, Harry retreated into his trunk once they took off in order to spend his time with Hedwig and Keziah. Plus, he could grab a snack while he got some more reading done. 

He supposed he could drop the wards and be social a bit. Jasper had even encouraged it somewhat. But he’d also told Harry to be careful.

It was his second week living in the trunk when Jasper realized Harry had no clue who he supposedly was. They’d just come back from the hairdresser and Jasper had mentioned keeping his hair swept lightly in front of his face to cover the scar.

Harry looked a little self-conscious for a moment and asked if it was that bad.

“No,” his friend reassured him. “It’s just that if someone sees it, they’ll know for sure who you are right away.”

“Why would someone know who I am?”

Jasper had run back to his own trunk and returned with a book and a stack of old newspapers.

Harry was enamored with how the pictures in the newspapers all seemed ‘alive’. He’d seen it on the regular copies of The Daily Prophet he’d gotten so far, but it still seemed amazing every time.

And those pages were how he saw a picture of Albus Dumbledore for the first time. That old man was the one taking money from his vaults. Hmmm. He didn’t look sinister, but even so…

After reading over the articles Jasper had brought, Harry sat back with a loud sigh. “This is ridiculous,” he’d said. “Hagrid said something about that too. But how did I “defeat” the Dark Lord when I was a baby?”

“Magic?” And that was Jasper’s answer for most of the truly unfathomable questions. “I don’t know Harry, that’s just what I’ve always heard.”

Harry didn’t look too happy about that, but Jasper kept going.

“You know how I said to watch out for those pureblood fanatics? Well watch out for the other side too. People see that scar, or learn your name, and a lot of them will be expecting things from you.”

“Expecting what?”

Jasper ran a hand across his face then waived it around to suggest ‘whatever’.

“Just… I think that sometimes, people turn out the way they do because everyone else believes they will. I had a friend in first year. Good guy, Samuel. But he was Slytherin. I didn’t have any problem with that, and we were both from the muggle world. But the rest of the school and most of the professors treated his house like they were the second coming of Satan.”

Harry thought that was just ridiculous. But his relatives had hated him his whole life for something ridiculous, so it was possible. “Because of his house?”

Jasper didn’t look happy about it either. “Yeah, everyone’s afraid of Slytherin. So most of them have targets on their backs for no other reason than wearing green on their robes. By the way, remember to not mention your snake thing to anyone, even if you do get sorted into that house. I think it’s cool, but believe me, _no one_ _else_ will.

“I guess just, be careful who you trust. People are going to expect you to be the person they want you to be. But you still get to decide if that’s who you are. For you, not for them.”

It hit him as something he’d already decided that he wanted. But before Jasper had put it into words, he didn’t know it could be such a struggle. And obviously his friend felt strongly about it but, “What happened to Samuel?”

“Eh,” Jasper waived another hand around. “He fell in with a rough crowd, got caught practicing dark magic. Got his wand snapped. The Samuel that I knew from first year would never have become what he ended up being. Not even second or third year. But by the time we graduated, he wasn’t the same guy.”

So… even though Harry _could_ drop the wards and be social on the train, he thought perhaps not. He would be meeting all of them soon enough.

When the whistle blows announcing their arrival, Harry has already dressed in his school robes, removed the Hogwarts trunk from his personal one, and shrunken that one down so it fits in his pocket. Jasper told him to leave his school trunk on the train. The staff would be expecting it.

Hagrid meets them on the platform. And at least Harry is starting out this experience with a familiar face. But then the man call’s his name as he greets him…. and all of the kids get quiet.

Jasper hadn’t been joking when he’d said that people would ‘know’ him.

He’s jostled by another boy, and he really hates to be jostled. But it’s the boy from the platform. The one with the red hair.

“I’m Ron,” he introduces proudly. “Ron Weasley. Are you really… You’re actually Harry Potter… Amazing!”

He has no idea why this boy would think that’s amazing. Despite having read about himself. But that’s not the interesting part. He’d said his name was Ron Weasley. _Weasley…._

He’s curious, of course he is. And he want’s answers. But now probably isn’t a good time for that.

“So it’s true then, what they said on the train. Harry Potter has come to Hogwarts.” The blonde boy with the flimsy mask pushed forward and introduced himself and his friends with more of an attitude than Harry thought was necessary.

Ron must have thought so too, because he snorted at the boy’s smug tone. Which turned into a smarmy dressing down from Draco.

No, Harry decided he didn’t want to be on either side of this situation. And when Draco started talking about some wizards being ‘better’ than others, he was sure of it. Plus, Jasper had warned him to keep clear of the drama.

And then there’s Hermione Granger. She happily steps in and lets the rest of the first-year students know all about Harry’s achievements in defeating the Dark Lord… in case they missed it in the back.

Make that three people he would be avoiding. Weasley, Malfoy, and Granger. 

All three of them have a similar feel. They all know who he is without him saying anything. Ron even went to brush his hair away, but he’d ducked back quickly enough to avoid it. He doesn’t even let Jasper do that and he feels hundred times more comfortable with the older boy than with Ron.

“I don’t like to be touched, thank you,” is all he gets out before Hagrid is back and leading them to the boats.

And the castle really is something. It’s lit up in the darkness and he knew he would have that ‘shock and awe’ moment that his friend told him about. But he didn’t actually _know…_ It really is something….

Their whole group is quiet as they’re led up to the main hall, but not really. There are whispers, some giggling. And he feels the weight of nearly every set of eyes on him.

He doesn’t enjoy it.

Still, there’s more to get through. He still has to see the sorting hat. He doesn’t know what order they’re being called in, certainly not alphabetical. But he watches the other students sit on the stool until it’s finally his turn.

Granger was first, she went to Gryffindor, though it took several minutes to sort her out. Draco went to Slytherin almost immediately.

Harry thinks he thinks he would rather Ravenclaw, like Jasper. He thinks he could live up to the characteristics for the house. And he’d heard a lot of good stories from his friend. He wants to learn as much as he can about magic, just like Jasper. 

The hat doesn’t give him the option.

In fact, it dismisses the notion before Harry had finished his request. No, he has to choose: Lions or Snakes. He picks Gryffindor. Call him a coward, but he doesn’t want the target on his back that he’d been warned about.

Harry being sorted into Gryffindor seemed to please the rest of the hall, people actually cheered.

It was slightly annoying, and he started getting a bit of a headache from the noise. But then… food. 

The feast is everything he was promised and more. _Somehow_ , he manages to keep himself from stuffing everything he sees in his mouth.

The dorms are nice. Comfy and cozy. But he prefers his own space. People try to talk to him again once they’re in their common room, and it seems Ron Weasley will be in his dorm room, but he really does want to get away from the commotion and noise.

With very little interest in the chatter, he turns in for the night and draws the curtains closed. After that, it’s simple as anything to put up the locking and silencing charms. And then he can shower in his own home and sleep in his own bed.

Well, after a bit of reading anyway. 

And Keziah needs to be fed. Jasper had helped him hollow out a space in the tree for the snake. He enjoys climbing the branches and roaming around the place, but he also likes curling up in a nice little spot. Plus he always takes his food back to his hollow for a bit.

Settling down for his first night in the castle isn’t as jarring as he feared it would be. He’s showered, changed, set his alarm clock, and he even had time to read a bit before falling asleep. 

Maybe this can work out nicely. He can focus on classes, study in peace in his trunk. Yes. He sets his mind to doing well in his classes and staying far from the drama he’d already got a glimpse of.

Then again….

Professor Snape hates him. He’s pretty sure.

The rest of the instructors have all been nice, but not Professor Snape. He has no idea what he did to the man, and he’s fairly confident that he’s been polite and respectful. But still, every interaction with the man had been adversarial so far and Harry has no idea where it’s coming from.

Remembering the story about Samuel, he supposes the Slytherin professor probably suffered his own share of antagonism as a student and this is just who he has become now.

Even so, Harry wasn’t the one to do any of that, so he doesn’t see how he should be blamed for it. But it’s okay for now.

Also, the Granger girl is constantly at his side. In their classes, in broom lessons, she even shows up randomly and inserts herself into whatever conversation he’s in. And she’s pushy about it too. And hardly ever kind. She talks to other people like they’re stupid. Harry really sort of hates it.

So, he pulls her aside one day after she was upset about something Ron said. Honestly, Ron sometimes is just as bad as her with how he treats people. But it’s obvious that she’s upset about the whole thing.

“Look,” Harry said when it was just the two of them. “You need to let go of this thing you do where you act like you have to prove you’re better than everyone. You grew up in the muggle world the same as me. So that means we both have to spend extra time catching up. But you don’t have to shove what you’ve learned in everyone’s faces.”

She looks terribly affronted. “I do not do that! And besides, we shouldn’t have to spend extra time. The school should be assisting us. It’s not fair that I spent months studying and practicing and they still look at me like I’m just a filthy muggle.”

“Who said that? Did Ron say that? Did any of the others in our house say you were just a muggle? Because I haven’t heard it.”

She looked away, down at the little pebbles on the ground. “No not them. But some of the other houses.”

And he got it. Well, not personally, no one had said that to him. But he knew it was there for some of the others. But if this was really bothering her, then she needed to find a way to overcome it. If not, it would always be something dragging her down.

“Well, what does it matter then?” He asked. “Your friends don’t think like that. Why not just ignore it?”

“Because it’s not fair!”

Ah, she was focusing on that side of it all. Well, then. Harry was somewhat of an expert there.

He gentled his tone a little, trying to sound friendly. “Hermione, life isn’t fair. Was it fair that I was orphaned when I was only a year old? Was it fair that the “family” who raised me treated me like I was lower than a servant? Is it fair that Ron and his whole group act like I’m some kind of reincarnated Jesus? No. It’s not fair. But that’s the cards in front of us.”

“I just want them to know that I can do everything they can do,” she said, mulishly. And then with more strength, “That I can even do it better.”

“Then just be better. You don’t have to rub their noses in it. Just be it. Ace your tests, study, learn more than them. Seriously, we have seven years to learn everything here. What does it matter if they know you can float a feather better than they can?” 

It took her a few minutes to come to some sort of decision on the matter. He waited.

“I suppose I _was_ sort of showing off, wasn’t I?”

“Yeah, a little bit,” he told her with a grin. Happy to see a matching grin start on her face. And then she looked at him imploringly.

“When you said ‘we’ does that mean you wouldn’t mind studying with me?”

He got them started on walking out of the courtyard. Classes were over, and they all had a few hours before dinner. But he took them the long way around to have more time and privacy.

“Well, I’m definitely gonna need your brain when we get into Arithmancy later on. That is if you’re taking that class.”

“Of course, I am,” she scoffed. “And Ancient Runes.”

“Then yes, I would be happy to study with you. If you answer one question for me.”

They had stopped walking again, “Okay…”

“Why have you been following me around?” Harry didn’t think his tone was very friendly anymore, and she must have thought so too, because she stammered out a reply.

“What? I-I haven’t…”

“You have. Ron and Seamus and even Malfoy do it too. But I think it’s because they see me as Harry Potter, the Boy-Who-Lived. Is that how you see me?”

There really wasn’t any use denying it again, and thankfully she didn’t insult him by trying. “N… No. Not really. But I am curious how it happened. Everything I’ve read about the killing curse says there’s no way to survive that. I don’t understand how you did. It made me curious.”

He didn’t know if that was better. Yeah, it probably was. “Like a science experiment?”

“No!”

He smiled again and started walking. “It’s okay, it was a joke. Honestly, I don’t know. Obviously, I have no memory of that, so I just don’t know.”

“But aren’t you curious?”

“Maybe, yeah. But there’s things that are more important right now. Like classes, and homework, and essays, and learning to write with a quill that doesn’t look like chicken scratch.”

She laughed at that. Good, so it wasn’t just him then.

“Are you okay now?” He asked before they turned the final corner that would lead to their common rooms. 

“Yes,” she gave a sigh, but it sounded relieved more than stressed and was accompanied by a not-so-polite eye roll. “Yes, I am okay now.”

He didn’t know if she went to study when they got back to the dorms, but he did. And he almost lost track of the time before he realized a few hours had passed and they should all be in the hall for dinner.

She was waiting for him in the common rooms when he came back down. Their talk earlier had been good for both of them. Because this time when he saw her, he didn’t feel uncomfortable or like she was ‘following’ him. It was sort of nice that she’d waited. 

For their meal, she was seated right next to him at the end of the table when Professor Quirrell ran in warbling about a troll in the dungeons.

Perhaps he should have kept track of the time better, he’d barely eaten his meal. Ha! Jasper would be eating his words later when Harry made his own supper after he’d retired behind his curtains for the evening. He knew he was right to stock up. 

After that, he settled into a nice routine with Hermione. They shared classes and ate meals together. She even came to him for help on a couple things, like their brooms class.

Harry took to it very well… Hermione struggled a bit.

He tried to explain to her that somehow being up in the air was like being free to him. No one could bother him up there. So the whole thing was just… easy.

She listened, but to her, being high off the ground and sitting on a very narrow stick did not equal ‘being safe.’

Harry disagreed. But despite that, when the tryouts for quidditch came around… he didn’t sign up. It was open to first years, but he honestly didn’t give it a second thought after he learned more about the sport.

He loved flying when it was just him. He did _not_ love the idea of people trying to knock him off his broom while he was up there. 

The other boys in his dorm try to convince him to at least go to the try-outs, but he was resolved on the matter. When they saw it was pointless after a couple weeks, they left him alone again.

Well, about quidditch at least.

Ron was always trying to get him to engage with the rest of them. And that sounded like a nice overture of friendship when he didn’t think about Ron’s last name, or the fact that he didn’t really enjoy spending time with the other boy and his friends. 

He absolutely does not take part in Ron and Seamus’ hijinks that they get up to. No matter how much they try to engage him. Hermione actually went off on Ron for it one time.

They were on their way to the library and Ron tried to get Harry to go exploring the castle with him.

Hermione snapped back around and firmly stated, “Just because you don’t mind the fact that you’re barely passing your classes doesn’t mean Harry and I want to fail.”

On most other people, Harry was sure that would be enough to get them to back off. Not so much with Ron. “Living in the library with your nose in a book is hardly the Gryffindor thing to do, is it? We’re supposed to be adventurous!”

“And I’m sure Harry will have plenty of adventures waiting for him when he passes his N.E.W.T.S.”

“N.E.W.T.S.!” The boy exclaimed in disbelief. “That’s _years_ away! Come on, have a little fun!”

“No Ronald!” She hissed back. They had reached the library and set their books down, but he followed them inside.

“If you don’t stop right this instant, I’ll call Madam Crispens over.” Ah, the librarian. Too late for that to be an idle threat. The ancient looking woman was headed over already. Ron glared at Hermione and stormed off. The old lady turned around and shuffled back to her desk.

Something about the boy was just pinging around in Harry’s head. He definitely didn’t like it. He has confirmed that Molly Weasley is the name of Ron’s mother; the woman he saw on the platform. He still doesn’t know however, why they are taking money from his vault.

It’s not the sort of thing that just comes up in normal conversation. 

Christmas is a bit annoying though. For some reason, Ron stays at Hogwarts even though his brothers go back home. Harry spends a lot of his time wandering the grounds and learning the layout of the place. After he’d finished his holiday essays of course and written his weekly letters back to Jasper.

Most of the time he can dodge Ron, but sometimes the other boy catches up to him. When that happens, he claims to have studying to do and excuses himself. It’s not a lie really, he does study a lot. It’s just that he’d prefer the company of Keziah and Hedwig while he does.

On Christmas, he receives two packages. One from Jasper, a heavy wool pullover in a nice deep blue color. It’s from the muggle world and he loves it. The other present is a shimmery cloak. He sees very quickly that it makes him invisible when he wears it and he’s _amazed_ at the concept. There’s no name on the note, but there is a reference that it used to belong to his father.

He immediately starts using it to avoid being followed in the halls.

In one of his wanderings, he comes across a room that looks like it’s used for storage. But it has a giant mirror that seems to want to draw him in.

Odd though… When he looks in the mirror, he sees himself for a moment before the scene changes. It’s an older man, and somehow, he knows that it’s him. Not too old, but definitely not eleven.

The room he’s in is dimly lit, but there is a lamp on the desk he’s sitting at. He has a signet ring on his writing hand and looks to be scribbling something, though Harry can’t see what it is.

When his left hand distractedly reaches for a teacup, Harry can see a wedding ring gleam in the light for a moment.

Very odd. Is the mirror telling his future? Is that what he’ll look like? Hmmm. The hair is shorter than it is now, even after he’d had it cut. He thinks he likes this new look better. Maybe he’ll go back for another visit over the summer.

He doesn’t look unhappy in the future. And he seems interested in whatever he’s writing. So that’s pretty nice. He wouldn’t want to be bored.

It’s while he’s examining the scene that another presence in the room startles him.

The headmaster.

Harry doesn’t know how long the older wizard has been there, but he suddenly becomes aware that he’s in a room alone with the man who is responsible for taking his money.

He doesn’t like it.

Still, he engages in conversation since it seems the headmaster is interested in talking. Which is how he learns that the cloak came from him. So… he knew his parents. And he knew them well enough that he had his father’s cloak. Interesting.

It’s also how he discovers that no, this mirror is not able to show his future. It shows what he supposedly wants the most. His deepest desire.

Huh. Harry thinks its all a bit amusing that his deepest desire is sitting at a desk and writing something. But there had been a wedding ring. He honestly doesn’t spend _any_ amount of time wishing he was married. But it was there all the same.

So, when Dumbledore asks what he sees, he gives the reply, “My family.”

It’s probably the truth, even if he doesn’t see anyone else but him.

And it seems to be the type of answer the headmaster expected.

Jasper was right. People _would_ have expectations of him. And it goes far enough that they expect to know what he’ll see in this mirror. They expect to know what his deepest desire is when they don’t even know him. He takes care not to let it show, but honestly… it’s offensive.

He doesn’t stay longer than he has to.

When Hermione gets back and classes start again, they get back into their normal routine: Studying, doing class work, and avoiding the dramatics from the other kids.

And it pays off. They end up passing their classes with no concerns. Well, there had been some anxiety from Hermione before they took their first exam. But then they started to understand that they were extremely prepared for the level of difficulty. 

Hermione and Harry, that is. Judging by the looks Ron got from the professors, he doubted the boy would be happy with his year-end marks.

There’d been some commotion with Professors Snape and Dumbledore one night near the end of classes, and Professor Quirrell was oddly absent from the last feast in the great hall, but by the time he was situated in the train for the ride back to the station, Harry was more or less pleased with his first year.

Also, he let Hermione into the train compartment before putting up his wards. She had no idea he could do that and immediately demanded he teach her.

He considered it for half a moment, then asked with a calculating look, “What do you know about unbreakable vows?”

She smiled back serenely. “Harry Potter, you’ve been keeping secrets from me.”

Then out of nowhere, she stood up to swat him with her robes. “For a whole year, Harry!”

They left Hogwarts laughing and Harry wasn’t upset about staying above with Hermione for the whole trip back.


	3. SUMMER BEFORE SECOND YEAR

Arriving back at the platform, he could see that the parents were already in place to greet their children. Harry and Hermione stayed in their seats for a few minutes and watched as the rest of the students flooded the area running for their families.

For the most part he saw smiles and happiness, and hugs. The other kids were all full of excitement and even from inside the train, he could hear the noise from the crowd kick up about five or six notches.

Hermione had been so happy as they’d gotten closer to their destination. Not about the train ride being over, but at the idea that they could spend time together over the summer. They were both from the muggle world, and it seemed to her that they could connect easier than their classmates who lived in the Wizarding World.

Which was true in theory, except for one very big factor: Harry had absolutely no intention of going back to the Dursleys.

He was happy with the set up that he’d put together with Jasper last summer. They had a relatively safe place for their trunks; as long as Jasper worked at the store, the owner was happy enough to leave the back alleyway to him for his living space. It made for a really short commute to work in the mornings, and he was actually a good employee. So, there were no concerns about the concession.

Still, he told Hermione that they could meet up in London at some point over the break if her parents were okay with it, even if he didn’t have a phone number to give her. He’d send Hedwig.

Some of the excitement of seeing her family again must have caught up with her as well, because she didn’t even demand a date and time like he thought she would. Instead, they exchanged goodbyes in the compartment, and she was off.

Harry stayed for a few more minutes, watched from the window as she found her parents, then opened his school trunk to pull out his cloak. He didn’t necessarily like having the trunks as separate items in his pocket, but it had been expected that he have the school one visible as they left Hogwarts. And then on the train, he hadn’t wanted to show Hermione his personal trunk just yet…. So. He had two to carry.

But it did make it a tad more convenient when he stored his robes for the ride, and retrieved his father’s invisibility cloak. 

Realizing he couldn’t just sit on the train for much longer, Harry shrugged it on, then pocketed his newly shrunken school trunk and stepped onto the platform.

It was easier to get around people when they couldn’t even see him, and he figured he would keep the cloak on all the way back to Diagon Alley. Except, as he got further away from the crowd, he noticed there was a figure up ahead watching the area.

Jasper had come to the station and was waiting for him. He was honestly surprised.

And then a devious streak came over him and he found he couldn’t help himself. He snuck around behind the older boy and put every effort into making sure he was as silent as possible. Jasper wasn’t moving from his spot at the stairs, but he did start to pace a little… maybe a bit distressed as he looked for Harry in the crowds.

“Can’t find what you’re looking for?”

“WhaaaaOh my god!” It would have been too much effort for Harry to hold in his laughter as his friend nearly lost his footing, grabbing onto the rail for stability.

Jasper whipped around, and even though he couldn’t see Harry, he knew that voice and he knew he was there. Besides, Harry had told him all about the cloak in his letters.

“You ready to go then?” Jasper asked, still not amused by the little prank.

He would have to get used to speaking when he was invisible versus the typical head nods and shakes, and shrugs, and faces he normally used. “Not yet. I want to see something.”

Harry kept the cloak on, but touched Jasper’s elbow to let him know he was standing just beside him. And together they watched the platform.

“There, by the pillar with the sign,” Harry directed Jasper’s attention to a small group. “The redheaded family. That’s the Weasleys. The mother is Molly Weasley.”

They watched the family loiter around, looking over the crowd even though they had already collected their children.

“They’re looking for you?” Jasper asked.

“I think so, yes.” It’s possible that they weren’t, that they were looking for someone else. But Harry counted the children. Ron, the little girl, the twins, the older prefect brother… they were all there. 

He’d kept Jasper up to date with the goings on in his school year, and his friend admitted the whole situation with Ron sounded shady. The kid either knew something about Harry, or he was just a bully. Whichever way, it made Ron into someone Harry would rather avoid than get close to.

Jasper gave a quiet hum and added, “We’ll need to make a stop somewhere private before we get too far away.” He spun and made his way away from the platform, knowing Harry would keep up, until he came to a room with shaded glass. As soon as Harry was through the door, Jasper closed it and threw up wards.

“Open the Hogwarts trunk,” he demanded. He didn’t sound mean about it, but there was a clear note of tension, and he was holding himself stiffly. Harry quickly shed the robe and pulled the trunks out of his pocket.

“What are you doing?” He asked as Jasper enlarged both, waiving his wand over top. Then there was a wave of blue light retracing the tops of the trunks, and around the sides over and around and making them shine.

And then the light turned darker and murky over the Hogwarts trunk.

Jasper immediately flung it open. He didn’t touch it, he didn’t touch anything. But one by one, every item in the trunk was brought out and put on the ground.

Tracking charms, Jasper explained to him. The spell from the wand was a scan to detect tracking charms. When the light turns shadowy, it means there’s one present.

To Harry’s horror, the pretty blue light turned dark a lot during the scan.

There were tracking charms on his things. On nearly every school robe Harry had, and another one on the jumper he was wearing.

“The scan didn’t show anything on your personal trunk, so I don’t think they got to it.”

“Check it again please.” He started putting away his belongings that were deemed cleared after Jasper nullified the charms. “Who would put these on though?”

His friend was still tense, and his face was still deeply set in disgust. “I don’t know but I have a few ideas. Whispers are starting up in Knockturn Alley. There’s things we need to talk about. But not here. Come on, I have groceries for you at home, but we should probably get off the streets as soon as we can. If someone is trying to track you then they’re going to start looking for you when you don’t turn up. Honestly, you should probably spend the first week inside unless you have your cloak on.”

Speaking of the cloak, Harry put it back up and they were on their way.

Knockturn Alley was known for being home to the dark creatures and wizards who had somehow escaped the Ministry’s eradication. Jasper frequented some of their shops when he had the money for it, and had heard the murmurs of the Dark Lord in the shadows.

Harry had written about his scar hurting during a couple of headaches, but Jasper had cautioned him to keep that out of the letters, lest someone intercepted them. At first Harry felt it was a bit paranoid, but now with the tracker charms… he wasn’t so sure.

He needed protection. Jasper promised him his summer was going to be filled with studying and learning the enchantments and spells he would need to start doing that for himself.

With the way things sounded, this was just the beginning.

He told Jasper about Hermione, but he advises Harry to leave it for one more year. At least. See if she is truly a friend, or really just a curious witch with no loyalties. Or worse, someone who was sent to keep close to him. 

And maybe Harry hadn’t reached that level of jaded that his friend had, but he was fairly sure Hermione could be trusted. But then again, he was eleven… what did he know? Still… “She said she would swear an unbreakable vow.”

And that apparently came as a shock. “You told her about those?”

“We study together,” he shrugged. “We read the same books. I haven’t shown her any of the ones you said to keep hidden, but I did share a little of the stuff in them. She really doesn’t like that some of the books are restricted in the library.”

“Yeah, the ones they didn’t purge altogether.”

Dark magic was outlawed. Which meant that the knowledge had to go as well. Ohhhh, Hermione is gonna hate that when she finds out.

“She’s a Gryffindor?” Jasper asked.

“Yeah, she said she asked the hat to put her there cause Dumbledore was one. I’m pretty sure she was supposed to be Ravenclaw.” 

“Maybe,” Jasper allowed. “But probably not. In your letters you said she stuck up for you with the other boys? That she challenged Ron? If it was sincere, then it sounds pretty Gryffindor to me.”

Hermione had made a habit of acting like a great big wall of defense between Harry and… well, anyone who had any sort of problem with him. And even though she had calmed down quite a bit, Hermione was still a force to be reckoned with wrapped in a tiny package.

To be fair, Harry could fight his own battles anytime he wanted. It was just so much easier to watch Hermione put people in their place. Also, seeing that one look on Draco Malfoy’s face when she told him to go crawl back inside his daddy’s bleach bottle…. Priceless.

The summer began, as advertised, with a lot of reading and studying the different ways Harry could use magic to protect himself. He had the invisibility cloak, but there were spells to help him go unnoticed in a crowd, ones to prevent a conversation from being overheard, ones to illuminate any hidden magical signatures in a room or detect the trace elements of people who had been there.

He learned how to scan his food and drink for the presence of potions, and how to draw the shadows around himself to avoid being seen.

Those last two came from one of the books out of Borgin and Burkes that he’d picked up the previous summer. It was a book that Jasper had warned him to keep hidden, and it sparked a bit of curiosity in him one evening.

“Jasper?” Harry called from his comfy seat in the corner of the couch. He waited until his friend looked up from the dining table and his own spread of books. “Is this Dark Magic?”

“You mean, is it evil?”

“I guess.” Evil was a strong word for Harry. He thought some of the ways people acted made them evil. They used their power to control others. To hurt them.

The way his relatives had treated him, that was suspiciously not good, maybe evil. And they didn’t have a scrap of magic between the three of them. But being able to use the shadows, the darkness, to hide… why would people be scared of a wizard learning that like it was evil? Why was the information in that book banned?

“It depends on how you look at it,” Jasper replied, devoting his attention now to Harry. “The shadow spell you’re learning, what would you do with it?”

“Um…” He thought about that for a few moments. Good question, what _would_ he do with it?

“Would you use it to stay in the dark corners of a room until you were alone and then steal what you found? Would you use it to sneak up on someone you wanted to hurt?”

“I don’t want to hurt anyone,” he protested. “Or steal things.”

“But you could.” Jasper wasn’t smiling, but the tone was still light. “The spells you learn from that book could give you the tools you need to do some pretty awful things.”

“Okay,” Harry countered. “But what if I used them to be the good guy?”

“Give me an example.”

“Well, the shadow spell will help me stay hidden. But what if I was using it to stay hidden from the bad guy. That doesn’t make me bad, too. It just makes it easier for me to get away from them.”

“Exactly, Harry.” And now his friend sounded pleased. “Magic is magic. Light, Dark… what does it matter? What _matters_ is what you are using it for. Even the worst spells, like the killing curse… When the Dark Lord and his followers used that spell, they did it because what they were trying to achieve was terrible and they wanted to kill anyone who stood in their way.”

Harry agreed with that. It had been the killing curse that the Dark Lord had used on his parents. And tried to use on him as a baby. There was nothing _good_ about that. And he said as much.

“ _But_ , what if you were in a position where you had no other choice? What if, using that curse was the only way you could survive, by preventing one of the ‘bad guys’ from killing you?”

Maybe… “But why can’t I just knock them out? There’s spells to do that. You taught me some of those.”

Jasper hummed in agreement. “But those can be countered.”

Harry had learned about dueling, in theory. He’d never had to, and they didn’t exactly have the space to get any first-hand knowledge of it. But he did understand the concept. Most spells that people used had counter-spells that Jasper had made him learn as well.

Again, they were still theoretical for the most part. But Jasper had said they would find somewhere to practice a bit further down the road when his magic was more stable. Harry was only just turning twelve, he was still learning to focus his magical core. The settling would come either through age, or through a ton of meditation… Harry wasn’t so good at the meditation.

Keziah had tried to help with it, apparently snakes do quite a bit of meditation. Or at least that’s what it sounded like. But Harry hadn’t liked sitting still for so long with nothing to focus on. The closest he came was watching the fire. He could make it probably about twenty minutes of watching the flames dance and clearing his mind.

“So, I can’t rely on the common spells because the bad guy might know how to stop it?”

Jasper nodded slowly, a thoughtful look crossing his face. “If someone is trying to hurt or kill you, then yes, it’s safe to think they might know the counters.”

“Then why not learn the less common ones?” Harry asked. “It doesn’t have to be the killing curse, but if not many people know about some of the other ones, then they probably don’t know how to stop them either.”

“You’re straying from the point,” Jasper laughed. “But yes, the more obscure the spell, the more likely it is for you to succeed in a fight. The _point_ is that it doesn’t matter if you learn the spell from a Dark book or not. It matters how you use it, what you use it for.”

“Well, I don’t think I’m going to be robbing someone with the shadow spell, so it’s fine.”

“ _Exactly_.” And there was another grin to go with that. Almost a proud look. It made Harry feel proud of himself too.

“But does using the Dark spells make someone a Dark wizard?”

Jasper shook his head. “The difference between Dark and Light magic is just about what comes more naturally to you. It doesn’t mean that you are a good guy, or a bad guy based on that alone. There have been some very good people whose core is Dark, because that is the type of magic that responds to them best.”

“So, there are Light wizards who are actually bad guys?”

“I’m sure there are,” he told the boy with a shrug. “My father is a Light wizard. I wouldn’t necessarily call him evil, but he knew about me… he abandoned my mother, and me after she died simply because she was a muggle. To me, that makes it hard to think of him as a _good_ person.”

“The Dursleys weren’t good people either…” Harry added softly.

They hadn’t discussed everything, but he’d shared enough about how his homelife had been that Jasper had adamantly told him it hadn’t been right, what they’d done.

“No, they weren’t.”

“What do you call muggles who aren’t good people?”

“Shitheads,” The deadpan delivery earned a snort of laughter from Harry. “And you can call wizards that too. Dark or Light magic aside, if someone is a bad person, they deserve the title of shithead. Now what do you want for dinner? This talk’s made me hungry.”

“Eh, we still have the pasta from last night, right?”

Jasper set about getting them both a bowl while Harry happily went back to the Dark book from the creepy store on Knockturn Alley. As long as he wasn’t using it to be a criminal, he didn’t see any reason to be afraid of it.

One day early into the next week, a heavy and persistent rain began to fall on Diagon Alley. Jasper still had to go into work, but he suggested Harry use the opportunity to get some shopping done. Not many people will be out, and Harry can use his normal cloak with the hood to hide.

Harry wants to get his hair cut anyway, and agreed that the smaller crowd was probably better.

To be fair, his hair hadn’t grown too much from the last time. Which, now that he thought about it, did seem kind of odd. His Aunt Petunia had attempted to cut (and shave a few times) Harry’s mop of curls back when he was living with them. And every time, it had grown back overnight. She’d always gotten so mad when it happened, but it wasn’t like he was doing it on purpose.

He likes the hairdresser that he and Jasper found though. Daniel. And the young wizard seemed friendly enough, never mentioning Harry’s scar, or acting like he knew who he was. He mostly seemed to care about ‘working his magic’ on the hair.

Luckily enough, Daniel is free to see him when he walks into the small salon. He’s just as happy to play with Harry’s hair again as he was the first time, and appears to be pleased the ‘straightening’ had held up in the many months away.

He did end up getting it cut short, closer to how he saw it in the mirror. But Daniel convinced him to keep it a little longer in the front, just enough to sweep down one side of his face. Easy enough to tuck behind his ear, but also easy to let it fall over the side of his forehead and conceal the scar underneath.

Also, it was nice to have a conversation with someone who didn’t really know him, and wasn’t all that invested in his life beyond the hour spent chatting while Daniel worked. _Also…_ while he didn’t like strangers in his space, Daniel seemed safe enough for Harry to relax around… Which was super awesome, because having the man wash his hair with warm, fragrant water was just about the best feeling ever.

He left the salon with a fresh, clean cut and a small book on easy hair color charms to look over with Jasper. Daniel had insisted that Harry would look fantastic with a nice blue tint to the front…. but he wasn’t sure he wanted to go there just yet. Still, the book was a nice addition to his ever-growing repertoire of new spells. 

He and Jasper did make it out to muggle London a few times over the summer, but unfortunately never met up with Hermione.

In the earliest letters they’d exchanged, she said that she would need her parent’s permission, and them being there, in order to meet up. But apparently, her parents had been super busy. For the _whole_ summer.

Harry totally understood, and anyway, Jasper had wanted to wait. He responded that he had a busy summer planned with studying and not to worry about it, they could meet up on the train when school started up again. But next summer, for sure, they’d do something.

Of course, the mention of studying turned into Hermione grilling him about exactly _what_ he was studying.

He wasn’t averse to sharing with her, but again Jasper advised caution. For now.

So he wrote back that he’s just going over some previous Hogwarts curriculum books in the hopes that they would be close enough to the one’s for the next year. It wasn’t a lie, he _had_ read those first, and he even offered to share them with her.

And true to his word, he sent her a couple bundles with Hedwig over the summer. At least until the list of their official second year books came out in August, and then he legitimately switched his regular reading over to those. 

As luck would have it, there wasn’t much change from the year before. Well, with the exception of his Defense Against the Dark Arts books…. There were a lot of those, all by the same author, and they didn’t really seem to have much to do with the subject matter.

Hmmm…. Just who exactly _was_ Gilderoy Lockhart?


	4. SECOND YEAR AT HOGWARTS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, this chapter certainly took longer than my 'weekly' update that I had planned. In my defense, work got busy, my entire state shut down due to a winter weather emergency (no power for a week)... and also, this chapter was a beast to get out. 
> 
> Anyways, sorry about the delay! Enjoy!! And I'll try to do better about sticking to those weekly updates.

Class schedules awaited them on their dorm beds the first night back. Then they had the weekend to request any changes if they wanted. While most students would make at least one attempt to get their timetables rearranged, Harry and Hermione were perfectly content with what they had.

They’d signed up for the introductory courses to the electives they wanted before leaving for the summer and had all of them reflected in their second-year schedules. Their electives didn’t conflict with their core classes, though they were not in with the majority of their housemates like they had been last year. At least their timetables matched each other; that was nice.

**Monday/Wednesday:**

  * Arithmancy
  * History of Magic
  * Lunch
  * Alchemy
  * Potions (M: Lecture; W: Lab)



**Tuesday/Thursday:**

  * D.A.D.A. (T: Lecture; TH: Lab)
  * Charms
  * Lunch
  * Herbology (T: Lecture; TH: Lab)
  * Ancient Runes



**Friday:**

  * Transfiguration
  * Astronomy
  * Lunch
  * Open



They had purposefully chosen a full course load, with three electives added to the list. Only one was required each term, and the open spaces in a schedule were typically converted to an independent study block. Aside from Friday’s open hours, where they had the majority of the afternoon free, they were about to be very busy.

And then… _then…_ Hermione just had to bring up the materials they were missing out on from the muggle schools. She was adamant that they find a way, _somehow_ to incorporate the expected achievements from muggle curriculums into their Hogwarts studies.

Harry really didn’t see how that was going to be possible, to be honest. He anticipated a lot of time in the library. Again.

Which meant weekends would likely be spent half on schoolwork, and half on their own personal interests (like muggle studies or going over the less known magics that weren’t taught in class). As they weren’t yet permitted to leave school grounds on the weekends, it didn’t seem like too much of a sacrifice.

Plus, they agreed that they would spend at least a few hours outside each week, just relaxing and _not_ talking about school.

And then….

Kill.

Kill, kill, kill.

Not a full week back in the school, and Harry was hearing the word ‘kill’ hissed throughout the halls. He thought that maybe he was imagining it. It didn’t happen all the time, and Hermione never heard it at all. But after classes were over for the day and a nice meal was in his stomach, he could hear it in the halls.

Well, that settled it; he was definitely cursed.

There was no one besides Hermione that he trusted to go to with the problem. No professors, and certainly no other students. He’d written a letter to Jasper that night. But before he sent Hedwig off with it, he showed it to Hermione at breakfast the next morning.

“Harry, this isn’t normal.”

She was underselling it a bit, he thought.

“I don’t hear it in the dorms. And I haven’t heard it in the daytime.” She’d read that in the letter, obviously. But he thought it was important to say again. “There’s something off about it too. Like the person is hissing out the word. And only ever that one word.”

She gave him a puzzled look. “Hissed?...”

“Yeah, hi--… Oh, of course!” He grabbed a quill from his school bag and scribbled a foot note on the letter before sealing it back up. “Come on, I need to get to the owlery before our first class.”

Based on her facial expressions, whatever epiphany he’d just had wasn’t clear to her. But she darted out of the great hall after him just the same. She questioned him when they made it to the windy open air, but he told her he wanted to see Jasper’s response first.

He didn’t actually know what it was, but the hissing might be a clue. While there were differences, it _did_ sort of sound like it was Keziah talking. Like it was a snake.

Then again, it might be nothing. They didn’t have time to stop for a research marathon on hearing random voices urging him to ‘kill’ like she wanted to. They still had class after all. With their detour as far away as it was, they only just made it before class started.

Unfortunately, that meant a seat towards the back. Harry was fine with that, but Hermione was particularly unthrilled.

Then again, their first class of the day was Defense Against the Dark Arts… 

So far, that class (and the professor) had not lived up to the hype. If Harry and Hermione had not taken a look at the typical schoolbook used for second-year Defense classes, they were sure the year would be a bust.

Guilderoy Lockhart was no teacher. And after closer examination of his books, Hermione doubted he was half as accomplished as he claimed to be. Timelines didn’t add up from one book to the next and she doubted he had been willing to get his hands as ‘dirty’ as they needed to be for some of it.

Really, neither of them could picture the pompous peacock crawling around in what amounted to a sewer system in order to obtain the fabled Scepter of Eldarus like his third book claimed. But the rest of the school seemed to buy it. If not, then why would Dumbledore invite him to teach?

Also, and this was the part Harry hated the most… The man had some kind of fixation on him. He even called Harry a celebrity in class and went on and on about how they would be unstoppable together.

He wasn’t sure he wanted to know what ‘together’ meant. But he had no intention of embarking on any kind of joint quest with the man. Even if he had, that thought would have been squashed after their first day of class. 

After that disaster, Harry was close to being convinced that anyone who willingly chose to teach at Hogwarts had their IQ automatically dropped by no less than twenty points at the start of each term.

How else was one to explain Lockhart?

The man had released Cornish pixies to wreak havoc on the students. Poor Neville had been lifted into the air by his ears and hung from the chandelier. Harry was intimately familiar with the pain of being dragged around by his ear, but he had no idea how much worse it must have felt for the boy to have his entire body weight hanging by just the tips of his ears.

He was surprised they weren’t torn off.

Ron had been sitting next to Seamus when the pixies came out, and both of them had initially been laughing about it all before one of them flew down, grabbed Ron’s wand and within seconds snapped it with the help of a few of the other tiny, blue-skinned devils. Ron and Seamus ran screaming from the room like the rest of the class. Including their idiot professor.

It came down to Harry and Hermione in the end. Harry had smacked one away from her with someone’s forgotten book, and she made short work of immobilizing the little imps and then levitating Neville down from the air.

“Th-Thanks Hermione,” Neville stuttered out before running from the class as well.

“So… I guess we have the rest of the hour free?” Harry suggested after they had levitated the last of the pixies into their cage.

But Hermione shook her head. “Not really. I have the practical test book for the end of year D.A.D.A. exams. I doubt he’s going to be teaching us much, we might as well study it ourselves.”

It was a good plan, and they could absolutely study it themselves since the official course hour wasn’t going to be much help. It was just one more part of the schooling that Hermione took issue with.

Even though Harry had spoken to her the year before about not counting on life being fair, it really was pretty blatant that the education they were receiving had some… holes.

For one thing, the types of people that were teaching (Lockhart) were questionable. How were they supposed to learn if they weren’t actually taught? And if it was expected that they teach themselves, then what was the point of going to class?

Then there was the bullying that apparently _none_ of the teachers saw. In fact, Harry had seen some of the teachers feed into the house rivalry that was only a step above being bullying itself.

Actually, no. That was still bullying. 

So was the blatant peer pressure from the rest of the boys in Harry’s dorm when they _again_ tried to talk him into joining the Quidditch team. They told him tryouts were open now since they were second-years. But that was confusing too, considering it was supposedly open to him last year when Harry was a first-year.

Yeah, turns out that wasn’t normal.

And _neither was the snake!!_ He wasn’t stupid about parseltongue anymore. He was 99% sure that’s what it was. But there were no snakes around besides Keziah, and it certainly wasn’t him. And this one sounded pretty loud.

And then one night, he grabbed Hermione’s arm when he heard it again on the way back from dinner. The two of them rushed down the halls, convinced someone was going to be hurt.

Someone had been.

Well, some _thing._ A cat. But that wasn’t the worrying part. Not when it was compared to the messaging written on the walls in… was that blood?

**The Chamber of Secrets has been opened. Enemies or the Heir beware.**

And of course, Professor McGonagall had answers about what that meant. And an interesting history lesson about the house founders. Apparently, Salazar Slytherin was the original supporter of this pureblood superiority idiocy. Interesting…

There was so much drama for being back in school for such a short time.

But what could they do except focus on their course work, and attempt to teach themselves their D.A.D.A. material? Which they could do. All except for one part… Apparently, there was a dueling practical as part of the end of year exams. Neither Harry nor Hermione had ever dueled.

Then again… Lockhart actually liked that aspect of the curriculum. By the next week, they had a full class session on dueling with Professor’s Lockhart and Snape. They called it a club.

Harry had yet to understand why Professor Snape hated him so much. But it was obvious he hadn’t warmed to the idea of him over the summer break. When Harry was brought up on to the dais (because _obviously_ Lockhart chose him), Snape pulled up Malfoy to face him.

About Malfoy… Harry might have been lax in how he had dealt with the boy before. Not that he wanted to go out of his way to antagonize anyone. But everyone had heard the bleached little shit call Hermione a mudblood in the hallway before.

He was all set to teach him a lesson, he had plenty of spells up his sleeves when that absolute idiot summoned a venomous snake onto the platform. And then Lockhart in his infinite wisdom had to go and make it angry. It was all he could do to keep it from striking one of the kids standing too close.

Also, what were they thinking standing so close?

But it didn’t seem to matter that he got the snake to stop. He had spoken in parseltongue. He knew he had. And the rest of the students reacted exactly like Jasper warned him they would. They thought he was a freak.

Even with Hermione standing by his side, the rest of the school gave him strange looks for a while after. Some of them outright hostile. Some of them from his own house. And his own dorm.

It sort of made sense. Here was Harry, talking to snakes when the founder of the house of Slytherin (the snake house) could also talk to snakes and was the creator of the Chamber of Secrets… which housed a monster….

To recap: Students were being petrified, there was a ‘monster’ roaming the halls, and Harry could talk to snakes.

He couldn’t win for losing. First Ron and his gang were yelling at him in their common room for not being nice enough to Ron’s sister Ginny back in their first week (that had been ridiculous) … Now they were yelling at him for speaking parseltongue.

On the Ginny thing… really, she kind of freaked Harry out a bit. She was way too starry eyed about him being this great savior person and it set Harry teeth grinding every time he encountered her.

Honestly, Ron with Seamus and Dean backing him up was starting to look an awful lot like Draco with Crabbe and Goyle.

One interesting thing to come out of it though: Harry noticed the Weasley twins take a giant step away from their brother. Their younger brother. Percy never got caught up in any of the drama of the house. If it weren’t for the fact that Harry knew the older boy’s scores were excellent, he would think Percy had been sleepwalking through everything.

The twins though… They seemed to like having fun. A lot of fun. And maybe last year they enjoyed themselves with Ron and his friends. But this year, they were almost always separate from it all. They didn’t sit close at the table for meals, and hardly ever joined in on the laughing and games.

But Harry did see them watching everything. And whispering to each other. They fluctuated between mirth over an inside joke they must have had, and a look of pure cunning shared only to themselves. He doubted there was a single thing they missed, and that spoke to a level of intellect that was admirable.

So this whole taking a step back from the shenanigans thing was… a bit odd. 

At least they weren’t whispering after him in the halls. Unlike their younger brother. But Harry tried not to focus on it. Hermione helped.

Maybe.

Harry didn’t know exactly how she did it, but Hermione bizarrely managed to convince him to attend a quidditch game. He didn’t really want to go, but maybe it could be good to put in a little face time cheering for his own house.

After the first year when Ron tried to get him to join, and this second year, _and_ Professor McGonagall had even suggested it Harry got the distinct feeling of being pushed into something.

He had no big driving need to show people how talented he was. And to be perfectly honest, while flying around on a broomstick was lot of fun, the imminent risk of bodily harm was a big turnoff for him.

No thank you.

And oh, how right he had been.

One game, just one. As a spectator in the stands even, not a player… The bludger had chased him from his seats, down the tower, and out into the pitch below. It got one good hit in on his arm before Hermione was able to stop it. But one hit was enough, he knew what a broken bone felt like when he had one.

Which was how he learned about skele-grow in the infirmary ward. He and Hermione read the label when the medi-witch left. He knew it could help heal past injuries to bones as well as grow new ones. Hermione helped him sort out the dose, and he settled in for a long night of bones mending themselves.

Silver linings and all. Still… he was staying far away from anything to do with quidditch from now on. 

But back to the ugly looks he was getting from the rest of the student body… Was there any possible way he was the Heir of Slytherin?

He figured if he was, something should have come up on the blood test at Gringotts. Afterall, it wasn’t like there were many people wandering around with the name ‘Slytherin’ anymore. For all they knew, Hermione herself was the heir.

Even so, it was a good question to look into. And who better to ask than Griphook. The goblin replied promptly, Harry loved that, and confirmed that he was in no way considered the Heir of Slytherin and was not able to access any of the Slytherin Family Vaults… of which there were many.

Huh.

Rather than correcting his goblin friend on the intention behind his original letter, Harry sent a reply with another query. Who was the current Heir of Slytherin?

Another prompt reply: Tom Marvolo Riddle

Harry had never heard of him and neither had Hermione. But if the message on the wall referred to him directly, then he had to be involved in Hogwarts somehow.

A neat fact to come out of the research that the two of them dove into… In everything they found, parseltongue is strictly inherited by the heirs of Slytherin. So, if Harry can talk to snakes, but he’s not descended from the Slytherin line… how?

Hermione shoved her journal under his nose one night. On the page was a list:

 **Fact #1:** Talking to snakes is a Slytherin bloodline trait.

 **Fact #2:** Harry can talk to snakes.

 **Fact #3:** Voldemort could talk to snakes.

 **Fact #4:** Voldemort killed Harry’s family and scarred Harry as a baby when he tried to kill him.

 **Fact #5:** Voldemort was killed while trying to kill baby Harry.

 **Fact #6:** HARRY CAN TALK TO SNAKES AND IS NOT A DESCENDANT OF SLYTHERIN

Harry snorted at the list. “I feel like this last one is trying to make a point.”

“Please tell me you are following the logic…” She sent back with a sigh.

Honestly, it wasn’t hard. “Yes, my speaking to snakes is somehow connected to Voldemort.”

Could he have, in some bizarre way, transferred his gift to Harry the night he died? But why would he do that? Harry sees it as a gift, not a curse. Why would that man ‘gift’ him with anything? He was trying to kill him.

He doesn’t mean to roam the halls by himself, not really. Usually he’s with Hermione, but sometimes he does put on his cloak and take a waltz around, usually when he’s mailing off letters back to Jasper.

Wearing the cloak, he doesn’t run the risk of stumbling into someone who would try and talk to him… or just talk about him as he passed by. But then…

Then, he saw Ginny one night. Odd since she was hardly ever out of the dorm at night. But there she was, wandering into a lavatory with an angry look on her face, clutching a diary tightly to her chest.

The interesting thing was that when she came back out, she didn’t have that diary anymore. Also, the floors were beginning to flood.

Naturally, Harry went to investigate.

Sure enough, he found the book laying on the floor, completely soaked. The ghost in the room was moaning about something or other, kids throwing things. Really, Harry was just here about the diary. He had no idea how to fix the water situation, nor did he want to get involved with figuring out why the ghost was upset.

He pulled the book out of the puddle, cast a quick cleaning charm on it, then a drying one for good measure. He could give it back to Ginny, but if she threw it away… maybe not. 

And then when he turned it over and saw the name on the back… definitely not.

Here it is. The descendant of Slytherin. The _Heir_ of Slytherin.

Of course he told Hermione the very next day. But when they ask Professor McGonagall if she knows a student by that name, they watched her face pale. It’s impressive because she is usually very pale to begin with.

They don’t tell her about the diary though. When she asks why he would be asking about that name, he tells her he saw it in the library somewhere.

While he didn’t actually know the diary was haunted when he picked it up, he caught on pretty quick.

First, there was the intelligent response writing back to him every time he so much as scribbled. As if a ‘talking’ diary wasn’t proof enough. Second (and more importantly), he could feel some of his energy being siphoned away each time he picked it up.

After that first night, he hadn’t brought it back out of the trunk. It was safer in his mind to keep the possibly haunted thing away from others.

It doesn’t take long at all for him to demand Tom present himself one night when he got annoyed by the attempted energy drain.

And... wow. Just… who was this guy?

Except, Harry knew who he was, his name at least. It was Tom. He’d said it was Tom. Also, it was written on the back.

“You’re Tom Riddle.”

The boy, one of the most dapper boys _(was that a word people used?)_ that Harry had ever seen smirked back. “And you’re Harry Potter. Tell me Harry, what is this place?”

They were in his study, Harry was at the desk while Tom had appeared closer to the leather sofa. It was all soft lighting for the evening, the way Harry liked. But Tom was able to clearly see the books lining the shelves.

“We’re in my study. Or library,” Harry told him. “Are you the Heir of Slytherin?”

In point of fact, Harry already knew the answer to the question. Tom _was_ the heir... Harry felt like that warranted a conversation.

Not Tom though. Well, not immediately. He was more interested in Harry’s home. And Keziah.

The snake was free to roam the place as he wanted. He did prefer his tree to most other spaces, but it wasn’t abnormal for him to curl up on the desk whenever Harry was in there for a while. Or wrap himself around his arm, like he was doing just then.

“I thought we were in the school?”

It might not be appropriate to be amused at a ghost’s confusion, but that didn’t change the fact that Harry was. “Technically, we _are_ still in the school. This is my trunk, but it’s more like my house, my home. Would you like a tour?”

Tom smiled back over, “If you wouldn’t mind.”

“I don’t mind at all.” He walked ahead of Tom out into the living room and settled Keziah back on a branch. “It’s not too big, really. You saw the library, this is the couch and fireplace. There’s the kitchen, dining room, and over here--” Harry led him towards the hall.

“This is the bathroom, and then my bedroom.”

Tom took his time looking over the space. It wasn’t cramped, but it was pretty simplistic. Just something that fit to Harry’s needs without having any unused rooms.

He liked it though, and it seemed, so did Tom. Though he couldn’t touch anything, he looked as solid as everything else in there when he joined him back in the living room.

When he heard Harry speaking to Keziah, he seemed _more_ than pleased with his new accommodations. Yeah, go figure the pureblood supremacist liked Harry talking to snakes.

But Tom wasn’t a pureblood. It took a couple weeks of them meeting nightly for a chat before Tom started to share more about himself. So far, he’d soaked up Harry’s life story like a sponge. Harry didn’t mind. It was actually kind of nice talking to someone new.

And Tom liked hearing about it. Plus, he’s fascinated with the idea of trunks, even after that first night. Much like Harry himself. 

When Harry mentioned the Chamber of Secrets about a month in, things took a turn for the shaky. 

The older boy tilted his head, “Why do you ask?”

Harry recognized the look as one Tom had when he thought he knew something that others didn’t. Harry was used to the look over the last month. He was less than amused. “There was a message left on the walls that the chamber was open. The message was in blood, and some people were petrified. I have a feeling you know exactly what I’m talking about.”

Tom though, Tom _did_ look amused.

“I’m a ghost Harry. How would I know about the chamber being opened?”

“Are you though?”

And that seemed to wipe off the friendly smile. It was more of a sneer now.

Harry continued, “Everything I’ve read about ghosts says they can’t take energy from people. You’ve tried to take energy from me ever since I found you.”

“Ah.” If he’d been able, Harry could have pictured him taking a seat on the sofa all prim and proper like. As it was, he wasn’t corporeal and walked back over to the fireplace to ‘rest’ there. “You are correct, I am not a ghost. I am closer to something like a memory.”

“And you wanted my energy?”

While he didn’t seem any friendlier, he did sigh and drop his shoulders a bit. It made him look more honest. “I’ve been trapped in that diary for fifty years. What little energy I was able to obtain is being spent presenting myself in this way, outside of it. But that will be gone soon, as you are somehow preventing me from drawing more. A most curious accomplishment on your part. How are you doing it, exactly?”

Harry shrugged. “I read about it in a book somewhere.”

“ _Curious._ Do you have a copy of this book?”

“Yes, in the library,” Harry dismissed the train of conversation. “What did you want to do with the energy?”

“With enough energy, I can become solid again.” Tom answered. “Cease to be a memory and regain my body.”

“And you need the Chamber of Secrets for that?”

That got another confused head tilt. “No, not at all.”

“Then why open it?” And now Harry was confused, which made the gleeful look come back to Tom’s face.

“I needed to get your attention,” he happily shared. “The girl who had my diary before told me a lot about you, you know. We were destined to meet, you and I. It’s only right that it should be _you_ who helps me return to my previous state.”

“And yet, you can’t seem to pull that energy from me on your own.” It may have been spiteful, but he didn’t like Tom’s smug tone.

Tom didn’t like his response either, so Harry considered them even. 

But then he asked, “Do you have to take it all from one person though?”

“I don’t understand.”

And was that a hopeful note in his voice?

“Well, couldn’t you take a little energy from several people and get the same result? Look, I don’t think for a second that you’re not going to need a huge amount of energy to do this. Probably enough to kill a single person. Not for nothing, but I don’t feel like I was destined to die for you.”

“You mean, wait longer?”

Harry snorted at that. “You’ve been in a diary for fifty years, and you’re having trouble being patient for a couple more weeks?”

“You’re twelve,” Tom spat back. “How are we even having a conversation about this? You’re too young to know the first thing about this kind of magic.”

Well, that was just rude.

“Try getting scalded with frying grease on your seventh birthday because you burned your uncle’s sausage patties, and he doesn’t like them crispy. Then talk to me about how old I should be to understand fractional equivalents. And you may have been a _memory_ for fifty years, but you’re still all of sixteen years old.”

“You were bur-… what does that have to do with making me corporeal?”

“It means I haven’t been a kid for a long time,” Harry sighed out and stretched his legs up beside him on the sofa. “And when I didn’t have anyone to spend time with, I started to read books. A lot of books. I only had the school library back in Surrey, but I was pretty comfortable with mathematical theories by the time I left. Science and physics are taking a _giant_ back seat now that there’s magic involved. But math… I’ve always done well there.

“So let’s say that a single witch or wizard’s magical core is made up of, I don’t know, twelve parts… just a number. But do you have to take all twelve parts from one person, or could you maybe take a part from one, then some from another person, then another person until you had all twelve parts?”

Actually, Tom started to consider the idea. It was surprising, Harry thought he’d stick to his impertinence a bit longer.

“In theory, yes. But my diary would need to be in their hands for it to work.”

Harry nodded back. “Let me worry about that. And when you do take the energy from them, is it gone forever? Will they be noticeably ‘less’ than they were before?”

Tom wavered a bit before responding but finally admitted with a shrug, “For a short time, yes. It would look like fatigue. The more I took from one person, the worse it would be. But they would still be able to get up and act normal mostly. Just… tired.

“How long is a ‘short time’?” Harry didn’t think he was being dishonest, but he needed all the facts.

Plus, Tom had a gleam back in his eye. Yes, it was always exciting to think a plan was going to work out.

“A couple days, a week, a month. It depends on how much I take.”

“How much did you get from Ginny already?”

That got a head shake. “Only enough to talk to you like this, like I said. Not enough to have a physical body of my own. And even this much will be gone soon.”

“Are there books in Salazar Slytherin’s library?”

If he’d had his body, Tom’s head would have probably smacked back against the wall at the totally random non-sequitur. “What?”

“You’ve been to the Chamber of Secrets. If it was created by one of the school’s founders, I thought there might be a library. Which makes me wonder if there are still books in there.”

Tom started to get that calculating look on his face again. “I said I opened it, not that I explored it.”

Harry laughed that away. “You absolutely did. Now, are there books?”

“Yes,” the older boy squinted back. “A lot of very old books.”

“Uh huh. And what kind of creature lives there?”

“Is this an interrogation?”

He sent a polite smile across to him. “No Tom. But students have been petrified and now the professors are suspicious. If I were to go down there right now, what would I find waiting for me?”

“Nothing.”

“….”

“….”

“….”

Tom let out a frustrated sigh, like he was being forced to give up all his worldly possessions. “The basilisk wouldn’t be released until someone called it forward.”

Harry really wasn’t trying to make this painful, but he needed to know.

“And you called it forward using Ginny before?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I suppose I should be happy you like being dramatic.”

“Excuse me?”

He rolled his eyes at the look of outrage. “You could’ve just killed Ginny that first time and had your body back, but no. You had to set a _basilisk_ loose in the school and put on a show. I’m saying it was fortunate you did, because otherwise we wouldn’t have met.”

“I said she wrote about you a lot,” Tom grumbled. “It made me want to meet you. I told you, it was destiny.”

There was an elephant in the room that Harry wanted to stop dancing around. He let out a long, tired sigh. “So… you know who I am?”

To his credit, Tom maintained eye contact. “Yes. Do you know who I am?”

“I’ve got a pretty good idea of who you turned into. But this is you at sixteen. You haven’t done everything he’s done.”

Tom almost looked sad that his ‘big reveal’ had been thwarted. Then he just looked mulish. 

“I will though. I may be his past, but he’s my future.”

“Look, my friend Jasper gave me a book and a bunch of old newspapers. Whatever your plans were, I think you should take a look at those and then tell me if it sounds like what you were going for.”

It was something that had irked Tom to no end. He could see the books in the library, but unless Harry pulled them down and turned the pages for him, he couldn’t read them.

“Explain.” He was _so_ demanding.

Harry nodded back that he would. “What exactly _were_ your objectives the first time? If you had a movement, which you did, then you had to want something. It couldn’t have just been all about murder and chaos.”

Genuine confusion was back. “What are you talking about?”

“What were you trying to get to? With your movement, I mean.”

“…Equality.”

Harry tucked his hair behind his ear ( _again, he had to do that at least thirty times a day)_ and gave Tom an incredulous look. “That’s it?”

“After Grindewald started his war, people were starting to ban information, even make certain kinds of magic illegal.”

He knew about that, of course he did. Jasper had told him. “Certain kinds… you mean dark magic.”

Tom had that frustrated tone back. “Yes, but who decides what’s dark? These labels didn’t exist back then. They did, but it wasn’t considered evil. Dark just meant old. The magic of the old ways passed down through families. If a witch or wizard was new to magic, if they came from the muggle world, it was hard to get your hands on that magic without knowing someone who knew someone, who knew someone.

“It was already segregated when I was in Hogwarts, but it wasn’t outright shunned. No one was going to go to Azkaban for being a dark wizard.”

It was sort of exciting to think of the side-by-side comparison they could do of Hogwarts over the years. Maybe later.

“When did that change?”

“I don’t know,” Tom shook his head. “Probably after I was sixteen.”

“Jasper might know,” Harry admitted. “He’s been teaching me a lot. And he seems to know the dark side too, but he warned me to keep it from the others here.”

Tom moved closer, “Your Ravenclaw friend?”

“Yeah.”

Tom snorted back at him. “Good luck telling a Ravenclaw they aren’t allowed to learn something.”

The more time he spent talking to Tom, the more he wished the boy was solid now. They could talk just the same, but there was something about his lack of an actual body that bothered Harry. 

It was true, what he had feared: Tom Riddle eventually became Lord Voldemort. But having conversations with this teenager version, spending time with him… Well, Harry liked their conversations more than he did most of his peers.

Hermione was an exception.

“So that was it?” He asked. “Making information free to all, dark or light?”

“To start with.”

Ah, there it was. Of course there would be more. Harry gestured for him to continue.

“I didn’t know about this world until I was eleven. The place I grew up…”

“The orphanage,” Harry supplied.

And that earned him a hateful look from the older boy. Tom was the one to tell him about that in the first place. Still, he’s got a hair trigger with that one. It’s fine if he mentions it, but god forbid someone else does…

“I had magic before I came to Hogwarts, so why did no one try and bring me in sooner? We are a small population when you look at the size of the muggle world. Surely someone has the time and ability to locate magical children before they come here. So why did no one do it? Why did I grow up in the middle of a warzone with muggles who hated me?

“I had magic, but that didn’t stop them from taking the lash to me when they thought I was misbehaving. And it didn’t stop bombs from dropping all over London. I could easily have been killed before I ever made it to sixteen. But even after I started school, they still sent me back there every summer.”

“Did you ask to stay?”

“Of course I did!”

And now Harry was somewhat happy he didn’t have a body. He didn’t want Tom’s outburst to damage anything in his home.

Harry thought for a moment and then started laughing. Tom looked offended.

“It’s just funny,” Harry told him, trying to explain he wasn’t laughing _at_ Tom. “You, me, Hermione, Jasper… we all come from similar backgrounds. Raised in the muggle world with no idea about this place before we got an invitation to come to Hogwarts.

“I think you and me had it worse than they did. Maybe-- Jasper doesn’t really talk about it, but Hermione says her parents are nice. I had a conversation like this with her last year. She thinks there should be some kind of introduction for muggle-born witches and wizards before they come to Hogwarts. It sounds like you two could probably agree on something like that.”

Tom appeared to be mollified. “I wouldn’t mind meeting her then. And by the way, what she wants is exactly the thing Salazar tried to do in his time.”

That couldn’t be right. What had Professor McGonagall said in class?

“I was told he wanted to keep muggle-born out of Hogwarts entirely.”

“No,” Tom said around a rueful grin. “He wanted to give them an immersion in our world before they started classes. Not keep them out altogether. It would have delayed them by a year at most. Or they could start earlier than the rest.”

Harry hummed along with the idea. “I think both of us would agree with you on that.”

“You should introduce me to her.”

He didn’t like how pleased Tom looked at the idea. “Yeah, no. You’re not leaching off of her.”

“You make me sound like a parasite,” he scoffed back, which only made Harry laugh.

That time, it _was_ at Tom.

“Right now, you are. No, I’ll start with my dorm mates and see where we are from there. Can you store it, or does it need to all be done close together?”

“I can store it. But I would prefer not to wait longer than I have to.”

Did the boy have _zero_ patience?

“And I would prefer if we don’t get caught. Speaking of, you know Lockhart’s trying to find the Chamber of Secrets to fight the monster, right?”

Tom didn’t look concerned. “Your professor? So?”

“So he thinks I’m the key.” Harry threw his head back on the couch cushions, fully stretching his legs out along the length. The subject of Lockhart was a tiring one, even if it was Harry himself who brought it up. 

“Well…”

“What?” He didn’t like the sound of that ‘well…’.

“You speak parseltongue,” Tom said, matter of fact. “That’s how it opens.”

“Of course it is.” Harry closed his eyes. He needed a nap. “I’m not going down there to be food for a basilisk though.”

Tom must have been amused by his muttering because he gave a gentle teasing back, “Harry… you speak parseltongue. Talk to her.”

“Her?”

“The snake.”

“No thank you.”

“Scared?” Tom was outright laughing at him now. “I thought you were a Gryffindor?”

“Yes, so I can avoid persecution for being a Slytherin,” Harry told him as though it should be obvious. “Not because I have an overabundance of courage.”

He got a hum back, neither agreeing nor disagreeing.

“Can’t you just release her into the forest? There’s plenty of things for her to hunt out there. Be free, and all that.”

“I could,” Tom admitted. “There is a tunnel that leads out to the forest.”

Often when talking to Tom, Harry was struck by the urge to ask, _Are you kidding me?!_ “Then why…”

“She never asked to go.”

He shook his head at the ridiculousness. “You’re getting your body back, then releasing the snake, then we’re raiding that library.”

Tom laughed at him again. It was those moments, where he would laugh that would _again_ make Harry wish the other boy had a body. He fluctuated between for/against several times through the days, but when it was ‘for’ he could feel the longing deep in his chest.

It was almost… companionable.

Tom carried on, regardless of Harry’s internal dialogue. “Harry, I’ve been in that library. It won’t fit inside yours.”

“Actually…. Yes, it can.” He didn’t even bother to open his eyes to look over as he responded. And then he continued when he heard nothing from the other boy. “Trunks. I’m already going to have to get you your own room. I only have one bed.”

“You won’t share?” Aaaaaaand there was the teasing voice back.

He snorted inelegantly back. “Before I got this place, I didn’t even have a bed. No. It’s mine, I’m not sharing.”

“Fair enough,” Tom let it go, not being worth a battle to him. “So what, put another trunk in the library and just fill it with books?”

“Basically. Why not?”

“And where would my trunk go? Outside the door?”

He thought about it for a moment. “It could. But it depends on what kind of trunk you want. Just a room, or a whole place like this. And being inside has an extra layer of wards so there’s that. Also, it keeps all the books in one place.”

He glanced over to see Tom nodding back at him.

“Okay, then I’ll ask Jasper to send those brochures with an owl.”

And he did. Those owls were awful little buggers too. One found him at the breakfast table about a week later with a giant bundle that disappeared as soon as he touched it. Everyone was shocked.

Harry of course knew what happened. And he knew that the next time he opened his trunk there would be a full post box waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs. But it would have been nice if the owl could have been a little more discrete with the delivery. As it was, he had to explain the disappearance of his mail to the table.

Hermione didn’t ask, bless her. But she had that look in her eye when she drew her attention away from her book that promised they would be talking about it later. Harry just sighed and waited for the inevitable.

She was able to curb her curiosity all the way through that day’s lessons, but as soon as they were back in their common rooms, before dinner, she tapped his arm and grabbed his robes to drag him back out to the hall.

“Hermione,” he whined. “I just want to sit down for five minutes.”

She wasn’t sympathetic. “You’ve spent most of the day sitting in class, your legs are fine. Now. What was that bit of wandless and wordless magic I saw you doing at breakfast?”

“It wasn’t,” he protested. “It’s just a redirection charm for any mail I get.”

“Where does it go?”

“In my trunk.”

“So that mail is up in your dorms?”

“It’s in my trunk.”

“Harry,” she hissed, pulling him out to the courtyard and still marching away from the castle. He had no choice but to follow, as she had yet to release her grip on his robes. When they were far enough away from anyone else, she continued. “I said I would take a vow. I told you last year I would do that. So why are you still keeping me in the dark about things?”

“I’m not doing it on purpose.”

She barely dignified that with, “Yes, you are.” before switching back to her questions: “What charm is it? The one that redirects your mail. Where did you learn it?”

“I read about it.”

“In what book?”

“There’s been a lot of books…”

“Where did you find the book? Did someone give it to you? Who?”

Tom owed him an apology. _This_ is what an interrogation feels like. He wondered if he could give one of his seats on the Wizengamot to Hermione when they reached the right age. She was brutal in her questioning, and the more he learned of the political side of his inheritance, the less he wanted to engage.

“A friend.”

“Really… someone at Hogwarts?”

She was relentless. He cast a quick muffliato to prevent others from overhearing. Not that there were any people nearby, but it _was_ possible someone could happen upon them. Really, he should have done that before they started talking.

“No.”

“You have friends outside of school? Wizarding friends?”

Should he be insulted? He felt like maybe, but it was Hermione, she probably didn’t mean it in a bad way. “I have two. Well, one definitely. I’m pretty sure the other one likes me, though I don’t know if he would call us friends.”

“Who is he?”

“My accountant at Gringotts.”

Her jaw dropped. “You have money? Oh, I guess you would. Yeah. Wait… Are you friends with a goblin!?”

“Sort of.”

“Harry, Goblins and wizards are not friends. They don’t particularly get along.”

He hated when he had to remind her that some of the things she knew weren’t actual fact. Although, to be fair… there wasn’t a lot of love lost between the Wizarding World and the Goblin Nation. Still…

“Who told you that?”

She looked away, wincing as she realized the fallacy of her reasoning. Her reply was so low it was barely above a whisper. “I heard some people talking.”

“And have you ever met a goblin?” Harry added, driving the point home.

“Well, no… not one from Gringotts.”

“Well… I have. And one of them spent a day walking around Diagon Alley with me to make sure I had what I needed to live in this world. Which is more than anyone working at Hogwarts has done.”

He thought for a moment, then sighed. “Jasper is going to kill me.”

The fire in her eyes was gone, but her curiosity remained. “His name is Jasper?”

“No, that’s someone else. I think it’s time for that vow now.”

The excitement returned so quickly it was like fireworks lit up her face. “Really!? You’re going to share? Finally.”

When he didn’t respond immediately, she added with a huff, “Well? I’m ready.”

“First, I need to check both of us for something.” He pulled out his wand and muttered the words Jasper had taught him to check for tracking charms. He was clean, as he typically checked himself throughout the day it was no surprise. But there was one on her.

With a quick flash of light from his wand, the charm was nullified, and Harry glanced up to see shock and confusion on Hermione’s face.

“What was that?”

“Tracking charm. Someone’s watching your movements. It’s dead now.”

“There was a charm on me?” She looked horrified and mildly scared. “I don’t understand this Harry. What is going on?”

“Hermione, we don’t have to do this. We can just go back inside and forget we even had this conversation. But if we keep going, it’s just going to get worse. You have to decide if you want me to drag you into the middle of my… crazy life. I can’t promise it’s the safest place for you.”

She raised her head high with false bravado and sniffed at the offer. “Well, I’m certainly not going to let you go through it alone. If your life is crazy, then I guess mine is too now.” 

He nodded, took her hand and looked directly in her eyes. “Do you, Hermione Granger swear to keep secret anything I, or any of my associates tells you in confidence? To not share any information you learn, hear, or see about my life… my past, present, and future endeavors? And that if you do, you will be forfeiting your magical core with no hope of ever regaining it?”

He could feel the magic heating up his palm, and a squeeze from Hermione let him know she could feel it too.

“I swear.”

A translucent, shimmering gold chain wrapped around both of their hands and for a split second there was searing heat. They both hissed in displeasure, but when they broke apart there were no marks to show for it on either of them.

Harry wasted no time before diving straight in. “When Hagrid took me to Diagon Alley the first time, we went to Gringotts. The goblin in charge of my account was Griphook, and he gave me the amount from my vault… that I didn’t even know I had… that Hagrid told him to give me. It was a lot, and then Hagrid took me around to get my school supplies. But afterwards, he took me back to my aunt’s house.

“They are truly awful people Hermione. I’m not going to get into everything that happened in that house, but I knew after the first week back that I couldn’t stay there. They hate magic. And hate me for having it.”

“Oh, Harry…”

Her nose scrunched up and her eyes watered. But Harry had no desire to be comforted by his friend’s concern. At this point, he was happy to put everything from that house in a little box in the back of his mind and keep it there for as long as he could. 

“Right, well… I left their home, came back to Diagon Alley, and rented a room at an inn. Honestly, I wonder if they would have let an eleven-year-old rent a room if they didn’t know who I was… but they did, so--

“Hagrid hadn’t let me spend too much time in most of the shops, so I went back. They have these trunks that can fit whole houses inside. That’s where I met Jasper. He works there, and showed me the different trunks they had, and long story short, I didn’t have enough money from what Hagrid pulled out of the vault, so Jasper took me back to Gringotts.

“Griphook was there and we did a blood test to see what I was authorized to withdraw. Hermione, I have a stupid amount of money. I’m not bragging. But if I had all of that money, why would the Dursley’s be raising me the way they were… which got Griphook thinking. He pulled up my bank statements, and apparently, every month a lot of money is leaving the Potter Family vault… which I can’t even access until I’m seventeen… and going to different people.

“Since the night my parents were killed, over a million galleons has been taken out and given to people I’d never met. Professor Dumbledore is one of those people.” He paused as he let out a shocked gasp, and then added, “and so is Ron’s mother, Molly Weasley.”

“What….”

“I have never in my life met that woman. But somehow, she’s been receiving a load of money from me every month since I was a baby.”

He could see Hermione was starting to get angry. “Harry, that’s…”

“There’s more. A large amount is given to Hogwarts every month, and more to the ministry and some organization called the OP Society… and to my aunt and uncle. Which explains how they had all that money to blow on my pig of a cousin whilst I lived in the cupboard under the stairs.”

She looked about near tears with that.

“Do you know it’s a four-bedroom house? One for my aunt and uncle, one for guests… which I am not, one for my cousin, and the fourth one is called _Dudley’s second bedroom_.”

“How has no one from social services been alerted?”

“Good question.” He nodded along with the thought before giving her an ugly sneer. “Then again, when I told my teacher one time a few years back, Uncle Vernon stood on my shoulder until it popped and then locked me in the cupboard for a few days to ‘think about my behavior’. No authorities came to look into anything.”

“Harry that’s abuse! You have to tell someone!”

“No, I don’t. Cause I’m never going back there. I haven’t been back since that week after Hagrid dropped me off. And I don’t intend to.”

She was still outraged, but didn’t contradict his plans. “Where have you been living then?”

That got a real smile from him. “In my trunk. Jasper and Griphook helped me get one of the full-sized home ones. Even if I can’t access my family vault right now, I have full and unlimited access to my trust vault. I had more than enough for the trunk. And it’s an actual home with everything I would need.”

“I want to see it,” she said with a firm nod of her head. 

“Well, it’s a bit small right now.” He pulled it out of his pocket and showed her. It just looked like a miniature one would find for a doll house. Not an actual, usable trunk. And certainly not large enough to even contemplate getting inside.

She was fascinated regardless. “Can you make it big?”

“Not out here. Not in the open like this. We would need a safe area for me to put up wards first.”

“Wards like what you did on the train?”

Honestly, Harry had surrounded himself with smart people. Jasper, Hermione, Tom… they never needed him to explain things twice, and sometimes they actually jumped ahead in the conversations, making connections on their own so Harry didn’t have to. It was nice.

“Exactly.”

“Well, why not the Room of Requirement?”

And that was a new bit of information. He didn’t know what she meant.

“The room of the what now?”

She rolled her eyes at his lack of awareness. “The Room of Requirement. Also known as the Come and Go Room? Oh Harry, honestly. It’s like you haven’t even read Hogwarts: A History.”

“…that’s because I haven’t.”

To be fair, he had read a _lot_ of books. Just not that one.

“And _that_ is why I know about it and you don’t.”

She grabbed his robes again. Dragging him back towards the school and inside. It took several minutes to get all the way up to the seventh floor. But once they were there, Hermione led him to the left wing.

“Okay, so pace in front of the wall three times and be sure to think about what you want to find inside. The room will give you what you’re looking for, within reason.”

“Within reason?”

“Well, it can’t break the laws of magic or anything, but yes.”

“Okay.” He thought about a library full of magical books, both light and dark, just to see if it would work.

And low and behold, a door was forming in the wall.

“Once we go in and close the door, no one else will be able to come in behind us. The room will only present itself again after we leave.”

“That’s brilliant,” Harry murmured. It truly was, he wasn’t just saying it for effect. A whole hidden room where no one else could find them. “Jasper would love this, I wonder if he knew about it.”

As soon as they enter, it’s like all of Harry’s dreams have come true. There are walls and walls filled with books that he could spend a lifetime sorting through and never reach the end.

“Oh, this is wonderful Harry.” And there was that covetous gleam in Hermione’s eyes. Harry was sure it must match his own. “We are definitely coming back here. But for now, let’s see this trunk.” 

He still set up the wards even after knowing the room was supposed to keep them safe. It was just habit now. And sure enough there was a large parcel stuffed inside his post box when they walked down the stairs. He was happy to see that the box itself had grown to accommodate the parcel’s proportions.

“That’s the mail from this morning,” Hermione exclaimed, recognizing the package. 

He grinned at her then opened the door.

“Oh…. Ohhhhh…” and then a completely gob smacked look came over her when he gave the command for the fireplace to light up. Hedwig hooted out a greeting and Keziah hissed his as well, reaching down from his branch to coil around Harry’s arm and settle across his shoulders.

“When you said a home, you meant…”

“A home.”

Harry hissed in parseltongue to Keziah “ **Tell Tom not to come out.”**

Keziah slithered down and into the study where the diary was kept.

Hermione paid it no mind, she already knew Harry could speak to snakes. “You have your own library… and a kitchen! Oh, this is wonderful Harry.”

He agreed. “So you see why I’m not worried about having a place to live.”

She giggled a little. “Yes, I can see that.”

“The bedroom and bathroom are this way.”

It was a quick tour, much the same as it had been with Tom. But he could tell she was excited about the whole thing.

“How much was this?”

He smiled again. “A lot. But like I said, I have the money.”

“You could go anywhere, travel anywhere…. And your home could just come with you in your pocket. I’m doing this. As soon as I have enough money, I’m doing this.”

While he loved her enthusiasm, “Hermoine, we’re twelve. That’s a long way off. And you live with your parents.”

“They wouldn’t notice I’m gone really.”

It was spoken as though she intended it to be an off-hand comment. But there was a hint of strain in her voice that told him there was more to it than just that. 

“What do you mean?”

She looked at him, then around the room, seeming to decide on whether to share or not. But then she sighed and sat down on the sofa. “It was this summer that I noticed it. They seemed to enjoy learning about the Wizarding World. And they went with me to Diagon Alley a few times and everything. They’re great, really. But most of this past summer they spent on vacation.”

“Okay…” He wasn’t seeing the problem, but it explained why they weren’t able to meet up over the summer. “Was the vacation nice?”

“I don’t know, they didn’t take me with them.”

“But you were eleven. They left you at home?”

She gave a tired grin. “Actually, I turned twelve right after we got to Hogwarts last year.”

“You didn’t say anything.”

“I know. I just didn’t want people to think I was older so I should know more. It’s not important anyway.”

“Hermione, your birthday is important. So you’re thirteen now?”

“Yeah,” she muttered back.

He couldn’t do anything to fix the fact that she’d been alone the past summer, or that she was celebrating (or _not_ celebrating) her birthdays in secret for the last two years. But he could change how they approached it going forward. 

“We’ll do a cake next year,” he told her. “I’ll make sure I stock up on the ingredients before we come back, and we’ll do a cake. Christmas is coming up. Are you going back for that?”

“I don’t think I will this year.” She was trying to be discrete with her sniffing, but he caught it. Still, he didn’t draw attention to it. “Besides, how will we get through all those books upstairs if I’m gone?”

He laughed with her at that. If Hermione wanted to change the subject, he was fine with it. She’d been nice enough to leave his own family life alone earlier, he could do her the same courtesy. 

She shook her head, clearing away any of their ‘emotional talk’ from the room. “Anyways, enough about me. What was in that mail from earlier?”

Harry hesitated, just long enough for her to see it.

“Am I being nosey?” She asked carefully.

“No, it’s fine. It’s brochures from Jasper. Or I hope it is. I asked him to send me some on extra trunks that I can put in here.”

 _Covetous_ eyes.

“I want to meet Jasper.”

And there was the Hermione he knew. He laughed again at the slight demand her requests were always peppered with. “Well, lets see what your summer plans are and that can probably happen.”

“You know, I think my whole summer calendar just cleared up. So, yes. That sounds like a plan.”

They look at the brochures. And he knows he’ll have to go over them with Tom later. For now though, it’s pretty fun to look through them with Hermione.

Jasper had sent a full range of the trunks they offer. She lingered over the one that mirrors what Harry has. Then took a look at the ones that have more rooms, more bathrooms, bigger and smaller kitchen sizes. And then she found the little booklets that go over the furniture and decorating choices and just gets lost in it all.

“What are those for?” She asks when she sees him setting a few aside.

He looked up to see she had collected her own little pile. “Oh, this is one for a library, and some more for bedroom options.”

“Are you needing more bedrooms?”

“Well, one for now.”

“For whom?”

Ohhh her inquisitive nature was back full blast. More like an inquisition if you asked Harry. But it was part of her, and it just highlighted the way her mind worked. He could appreciate that, and he really couldn’t fault her for wanting all the facts. He was the same.

“I have a friend who will probably come and live with me for a while.”

“Jasper?”

“No.”

“Harry.” She hated to be left in the dark about the details. 

“I’ll introduce you to him later. He’s not here right now. But it’s just someone who will need a place to stay for a while.”

“And he’ll be here in Hogwarts with you?”

“When I’m here, yes.”

“But he’s not a student.” It wasn’t an accusation, more of a collection of facts.

If they weren’t so close already, and if he didn’t know her like he did, he might have thought she would take issue with something that _had_ to be breaking school rules.

But after their first year, where she watched how the school ran right next to Harry… and after this year where she watched the teachers behavior (Lockhart) and saw firsthand how they were not necessarily keeping the best interest of the kids in mind… well, he didn’t think she had any problems _bending_ a few of the rules.

Realistically, it was hubris to think they knew better than the rest of the adults around them. But none of the adults made any sense lately, so even though they were twelve (and thirteen, respectively), they were fine deciding for themselves on the best course of action. 

Which was why Harry answered honestly, “He was, once.”

“Just tell me.”

“I will,” he promised, “just not yet.”

No matter how close they were, he needed a little more time figuring out how to break it to her that he’s got the ghost ( _memory_ ) of a sixteen-year-old Dark Lord in his trunk. 

They had time though.

Their previous excursions to the Hogwarts library become frequent returns to the Room of Requirement for study purposes.

The scan of their persons for tracking charms becomes a common habit of Hermione’s the way it has been for Harry over the last few months.

She doesn’t always find them on herself, but it’s often enough to make her discomfort around her peers grow. She has no idea who is doing it, but it makes it hard for her to trust many of the others.

He did in fact end up ordering a trunk for a library extension. It arrived on their Christmas break, and ever since then, he and Hermione had started collecting some of the books from the massive Room’s library and filling his shelves.

“No, I don’t feel guilty,” Hermione had told him when he asked about it over their break. “It’s not like we’re stealing necessarily, we’re just taking it back. Think about it, Harry, all of these books are here in Hogwarts, but they’re not in the library for the students… why? What’s in here that they don’t want us to have? And that’s absurd anyway. They can’t _ban_ books. That’s illegal.”

Harry looked over to his current pile of ‘Dark’ books, “I don’t think it’s illegal in the Wizarding World.”

She huffed in annoyance. “Then the Wizarding World has lost its way. Information should be free.”

And that was the moment he knew, without a doubt, that he would be introducing her to Tom and Jasper. 

One was a Ravenclaw who would agree with her on principle, and one was a Slytherin who would delight in having another person to share in his fervent cause.

On the evening before the rest of the students were due to return from Christmas celebrations, they were in his trunk up in the Room of Requirement and Harry decided to test his theory.

“Hermione,” Harry called across his new library room. The room itself was quite large. Enough to have two floors of shelves and some tables and couches in the middle.

“If you could go back in time and stop Voldemort before he turned into… Voldemort. Do you think you would?”

She barely glanced up from the book she was reading. “What, like take him out when he was a baby? No, I wouldn’t kill a baby. And time travel isn’t real anyway.”

“Well actually, it might be. But that’s not important right now. Why wouldn’t you kill him as a baby?”

And now he had her full attention.

“First, we will be having a talk about that time travel comment later. Second, because as a baby, he hasn’t done anything to turn him into a monster yet. It’s psychology, isn’t it? I’ve read plenty where people ask if it’s nurture versus nature that makes someone a monster. Was a child born just being evil from the start? Or did his life experiences shape him into becoming that way?

“I for one think it has more to do with the life experiences. Look at you and Ron. You had nothing growing up. No possessions, no adherence to nutritional standards, not even a relative who cared about you. And you Harry, are what the books would politely call ‘guarded’. You don’t trust people’s motives, and you’re suspicious of practically everyone we meet.”

It was probably true, but wow… she was very blunt about it. But she didn’t stop there.

“Whereas Ron, he grew up in a big, happy family where he had all of his needs met. Sure, he had hand-me-down clothes… which honestly, if they were taking your money every month, what are they doing with it?... but he walks around the halls like he can act however he wants and say whatever he wants. Ginny does that too, and she’s a first year. And don’t even get me started on Malfoy with his upper society, pureblood garbage.

“So, you are the same age, but with different upbringings. Your life experiences shaped you into how you act today. No one is born a monster.”

He was happy to hear it. Because he thought the same thing.

“Then you’re saying, if Voldemort had friends growing up… if he had better life experiences, he wouldn’t turn into the monster that he did?”

That actually made her pause to think. “We don’t know what his life experiences were.”

“What if we did?”

“Well…” She was willing to follow the line of reasoning through. “He was truly horrible, so there had to be _some_ kind of trauma there. But I think also, that at some point, we become aware of how we act and can make the choice to continue or change. Like with me. I behaved a certain way last year because of my own insecurities. You pointed it out to me, and I didn’t like what I saw. So, I changed it.

“Voldemort murdered a lot of people. There is no way he didn’t know that was absolutely wrong. He just didn’t care to change it.”

“But if you had the chance to sit down with, let’s say sixteen-year-old Voldemort…. Before he ever became Voldemort… when he was just a student here at Hogwarts and had the same kind of muggle-born history as you, and had all these very valid ideas for improving things in the Wizarding World…would you?”

She narrowed her eyes and practically glared at him. “That’s a very specific hypothetical.”

“I know.” He _did_ know. For someone like Hermione, this was practically spoon-feeding her the answer. 

She didn’t appear to appreciate it either. “Harry, have you ever thought of me as particularly stupid? Like when you think of me, does your brain show you a girl who can’t put two and two together or read the subtext?”

She got up in a huff and stomped out of the giant library, through his personal study, through the living room, and into the kitchen to refill her tea. He followed behind and took a seat on the sofa.

“No, I don’t think of you like that at all,” he promised, cringing when she shot him another glare over the counter before coming back to sit on the other end of the cushions.

“Then tell me where he is.”

“Who?”

“Voldemort!”

He was happy she had set her cup down before that little explosion.

“He has a name…” Harry responded calmly.

“Yes, I just said Volde--”

The figure walking through the office doors caught her attention. He appeared solid, though he (maybe) purposefully stood with half a leg through the coffee table to reinforce that he wasn’t actually able to manipulate objects in the room.

And then, as polite as could be, “Hello Miss Granger, Harry has told me a lot about you. My name is Tom Riddle, I’m so glad we could finally meet.” 

Hermione seemed frozen for a moment, just staring at the older boy in front of her. “Harry…” she murmured over very quietly. “Harry. I don’t know how yet, but before we leave this school, I will MURDER YOU IN YOUR SLEEP! I SWEAR I WILL! HOW COULD YOU. *whack* NOT. *whack* TELL ME. *whack* YOU WERE BEING SO. *whack* STUPID!?!" *whack* *whack* *whack*

Tom looked on as Hermione proceeded to grab a pillow from the couch and clobber Harry on the arm. Repeatedly.

The pillow was too soft to actually hurt, but Harry tried to placate her anyway. “He’s just a student Hermione! I swear, he’s not even able to touch us, only talk.”

“Words can be poison too,” she insisted. “I can’t believe this. I can’t _believe_ you.”

Tom wisely said nothing, choosing instead to go talk to Keziah and give them the illusion of privacy.

“You just said he’s not evil yet,” Harry rushed to remind her. 

But her gaze was fixed on Tom, watching his movements closely. “Oh now he’s whispering to the snake in the tree. What is this, the garden of Eden?”

That got an actual laugh out of Tom, who was only giving the _illusion_ of privacy while listening to every word. “I knew I would like her, you were right Harry.”

“You two talk about me?” She actually sounded hurt for a second.

Harry assured her, “Only about how smart you are.”

“Well, that’s something at least.”

“Forgive me, Miss Granger. Harry thought you and I might share some of the same ideals.” Tom ignored her affronted glare at Harry. “And as he said, I am not Voldemort yet. However, I do intend to rise to a similar level of greatness as he once did.”

She wasn’t impressed. “By murdering people?”

“No, Harry… frowns… on that approach to problem solving.”

“Harry does. But you don’t?”

Smart girl. Very smart.

“He doesn’t mean it like that Hermione,” Harry said, trying to turn the conversation around.

Tom wouldn’t have it though and gave Harry a look of disappointment, “Yes, I do. Let’s not lie to her, Harry. If you want her to join us, then deception may not be the best method.”

“You.. Join you…” And for the first moment since Tom entered the room, Hermione let a tiny glimpse of fear cross her features. “Harry what have you gotten yourself into? What did you get me into?”

Tom answered for him. “I can assure you it is nothing scandalous or _evil,_ Miss Granger. Merely an exchanging of ideas amongst like-minded people.”

For whatever reason, any of that fear dissipated quickly. 

“Oh, cut the act,” she deadpanned back to him. “Stop being so smarmy and stop calling me that. My name is Hermione, just call me that.”

Tom looked taken aback for a moment before an honest smile came across his face. “I see now why you were sorted into Gryffindor. Good. We’ll need that.”

“Need it for what?”

Harry decided to offer his little bit, maybe that would stop the staring contest the two had going. “Tom has ideas.”

But the older boy corrected him. “They’re _our_ ideas, Harry.”

He rolled his eyes at that. “Yeah, okay.”

“Once I get my body back, you’ll wish you had better control over your insolence.”

Harry let out an ugly snort, “…Insolence.”

“When you get your body back?” Hermione interjected. “And how exactly are you planning on doing that?”

“I need magical energy from several witches and wizards to be fully restored. As Harry is adamantly against murder.” Tom replied, like it was no big deal. 

Hermione nodded, “Yes, I am also adamantly against murder.”

“Wonderful.”

“So you’re going to steal people’s magic?” Hermione summarized.

Harry quickly added, “No, not permanently. It’s like a blood draw. It replenishes itself in time. I’ve done the research, I’ll show you if you want.”

“Have you… have you drawn from me?”

“No,” Tom answered solemnly at the same time as Harry loudly attested,

“No! Absolutely not. Hermione I would never allow that. It was one of the promises I had him make."

“Not from me, but from others is okay?”

“Hermione, I’m in a school surrounded by thieves and sycophants. I’m sorry, but my moral compass isn’t having a problem with this.”

She responded with a single huff. Harry thinks that she knows it’s right to see something wrong with it, but he doesn’t think she actually has a moral dilemma going on. If she did, she wouldn’t stay quiet about it.

“When are you doing this?”

When, not if. She asked _when._ Which told him everything he needed to know to relax again. She was with them.

“Before school is out,” he told her quickly. “In the next couple of months probably.”

“Probably… That gives me time to look into it, I guess. And what happens when he has a physical body again? What, he’s just going to quietly go along with everything? Sit back and let us carry out our second year?”

“Yes, I am,” Tom promised her. “Once summer break comes, we can decide from there if I will be staying or not. But for now, I will be staying safe from your delusional headmaster inside of this trunk.”

“Safe from Dumbledore?” She mused. “Yes, of course. I read that he is the one wizard you ever feared.”

“I don’t fear him!” Tom hissed out. “In my current state I am absolutely defenseless. When I do return, it will take me months, perhaps years to grow back to the level of power I had. And I’ll need a good deal more than that if I want to protect myself from Albus Dumbledore.”

He paced around, not having the option of throwing himself on the couch, though Harry was pretty sure that _once again_ if he could’ve, he would’ve. “And Harry is no more than a child. He can’t be expected to fight for me.”

Hermione’s face showed that she liked that answer well enough. “While I’m happy you don’t plan to use my friend like cannon fodder, are you’re so sure you will have to fight Dumbledore?”

Harry nudged her arm. “Remember Hermione, he’s been taking my money for the last ten years. He is my ‘guardian’ in the Wizarding World, but he left me with the Dursleys. And do you really think he’s not behind the tracking charms?”

She sat for a long moment, considering everything. “The war never really ended, did it? I mean they say you defeated Voldemort, which we both know is rubbish. But it’s still been going on all these years… And now we’re caught up in it.”

“I did offer you an out at the beginning,” Harry gently added. He hated to think that he’d gotten her caught up in this mess. Especially if she was reconsidering her involvement. 

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous. I wouldn’t have taken it even if I knew.”

Tom smiled at her again, completely over his earlier anger. “I do think I will like you.”

Hermione grinned. “Not for long you won’t. Tell me about these ideas the two of you have and I’ll tell you what you need to fix.”

One elegant brow rose, but the smile never left. 

And the three of them set about defining, redefining, and revising plans for the future. Everything from the next few months to vague notions of restructuring the educational and legal realms of the Wizarding World. 

The Chamber of Secrets stayed closed for the remaining months of the school, no more students were petrified, and it seemed the administration believed the problem had resolved itself. But there is still a healthy level of whispering and rumors amongst the student body whenever Harry and Hermione were present.

And then some of the boys from the Gryffindor house started falling asleep in class. Occasionally, one of the girls would nearly fall asleep in her breakfast.

It happened close enough to the end of year exams that it was written off as excessive studying. Besides, most of the Ravenclaw table looked like that on the regular.

But two of the Gryffindors know what’s going on. Harry and Hermione.

After Harry and Tom explained the plan, she admonished them both for being reckless.

“You can’t just pull magic from the other boys in your dorm room Harry, that’s called a pattern. It needs to be spread out.”

Tom promised and promised that he wouldn’t take energy from Hermione if she smuggled his diary into the girl’s dorm room, but it wasn’t until they found the spell to lock a witch or wizard’s magic inside that she willingly picked up the diary.

They weren’t sure how Harry actually did it for himself. It wasn’t a spell, and he hadn’t actually read about it before. He just _did_ it. But for Hermione, she needed the spell.

Her argument was that she hadn’t known Tom as long as Harry, so that level of trust wasn’t there yet.

He admired her caution.

Waiting to start until nearing exams was also her idea. Tom certainly wasn’t happy about the months added to his wait, but he admitted that it would be best not to rouse suspicion.

Another bright note was that Professor Snape had been acting _different_ around Harry. He must have noticed how the two second years were kept at arms-length from the rest of their house at meals. It was glaringly obvious to anyone with eyes.

After one too many unfriendly jostles from the others, Harry and Hermione had started sitting at the far end of the table, several seats down from the rest of their house.

 _Interestingly_ , Fred and George Weasley joined them. They were good conversationalists once people got used them finishing each other’s sentences. And after a few discreet checks, they didn’t appear to be placing any tracking charms on them.

Percy gave them an odd look once, and Ron complained loudly a few times. But the twins seemed resolute in their new seating arrangements.

“Potter and Granger, stay behind,” Snape called out after their final Potions exam.

Draco and Ron, along with their respective gangs all snickered at the thought of the two of them being in trouble.

Harry waited until the last student was gone before addressing the man. “Yes, Professor?”

“The two of you completed your exams faster than any other student in this class. And having already reviewed them, I can say that you have both earned top marks.”

They shared a happy smile.

His expression didn’t gentle at all, nor did his tone of voice suddenly become any friendlier. But he wasn’t being overly hostile either.

“I have some books for the two of you. I want you to look them over this summer and meet with me at the start of the next term. You likely won’t have access to a potions lab so I don’t expect you to have accomplished any of the practicals in these books. But if you feel you can work at this level, we will set aside extra-curricular time next year for advanced studies.”

“Of course, Professor Snape!” Hermione gushed. “We would be happy to.”

Harry could tell him that he could just purchase a trunk with a lab in it, but he felt it better to keep that to himself. He released them before Harry had to think about it too hard.

Snape had surprised him by the offer, seriously. Then again, the potions professor had also been the impetus for some of the best entertainment of the year…

Because of Professor Snape, their ex-professor Lockhart had been taken by the Ministry right before exams for gross misuse of the Obliviate charm and profiting from deception. He had _not_ in fact killed the monster from the Chamber of Secrets like he had been claiming.

Harry and Hermione had already known that, but it wasn’t like they could actually tell anyone.

Snape on the other hand, had no problem ‘accidentally’ slipping a bit of veritiserum into Lockhart’s goblet at dinner one evening.

Yeah, Fred and George had caught the slight of hand and alerted the two second-years to it.

 _It was totally by accident_.

But then, totally on purpose… questioning the professor in front of basically the entire student body about what _really_ happened in the Chamber of Secrets, and in all those books of his. The Ministry’s Aurors had arrived before the next meal was over to escort him out for a round of official questioning.

So… Snape was pretty cool. And he wanted to help the two of them get better at potions.

It would be a lot of work they hadn’t planned on, but was an exciting thought. _And…_ His own potions lab! The more he thought about it, the more he knew he was going to do it. Besides, he would need to modify a bit of the decorating in his trunk this summer anyway.

They had already agreed Tom’s trunk (one that looked like a stand-up dresser) would be placed in the back area of the dining nook. It blended in, and just looked like another cupboard. And he was strongly considering purchasing another one for Hermione, but he hadn’t told her that yet.

The trunk in his office had the same exterior look to it as the one Tom got. Harry had blended it into the bookshelves that were already there, but he could make more space along the walls for a potions lab if he wanted.

About Tom though, they only had a few days left to wrap up their plans. 

Lavender Brown is the last one to pull from.

Hermione can’t stand her anyway.

And then… Tom is real. Hermione and Harry are both there for it. The first thing Tom does is lift harry off the ground in a big hug. It’s the first time Hermione has seen Harry be okay with touch. She’d noticed that he shies away from it mostly.

Tom is even so happy that he gives Hermione a small hug herself. But no lifting in the air.

After fifty years, Tom can experience the real world again. He can eat food (Harry had used his cloak to sneak into the kitchens for groceries. He figures why not, he’s paying a lot of money to the school each month anyway). A Bath. Holding a book. Holding Keziah. Feeling the fire. Sitting on a couch. Tea.

He approaches each new, basic action like it’s the height of luxury. Hermione and Harry are both humbled to think about all of the things they take for granted every day. Even Harry, who grew up with so many restrictions wouldn’t have considered half of the experiences to be particularly novel. 

Alas, none of Harry’s clothes fit Tom, and he only has his school uniform. They’ll be leaving in a couple days though. Tom says he can wait.

The basilisk was indeed released to the forest. To be honest, Tom had hesitated a little at the thought of seeing the snake go. But she had been so hungry for so long. Rats were an awfully small meal to try and live off of.

And of course, there was Slytherin’s library. Harry was happy that he got such a big trunk for that. Hermione insisted on joining them when they went down to the chamber, though Harry could see that she was really still quite frightened to be there.

The invisibility cloak was only big enough to have two people hidden underneath, so Tom stayed inside the trunk in Harry’s pocked until he had made it through the main opening in the bathroom.

Once they were inside, Harry brought Tom back out and repocketed the trunk and cloak. 

It was an impressive sight, and climbing through the mouth of a giant statue to get to the secret chamber _within_ the Chamber of Secrets was exhilarating for them. Harry insisted on climbing up himself, but Hermione accepted Tom’s help (and his height) to get inside.

Harry enlarged and opened the trunk and they watched as Tom did a quick spell that had the books floating single file down into the trunks and through to the big library shelves.

There were more items in the room that they weren’t really sure about. Some parchments on the desk in the room. They took it all. Even Salazar Slytherin’s old inkwell. Even the rugs, that had somehow stood the test of time and were not at all moldy despite being locked away in a cold dungeon chamber for centuries.

Tom hadn’t been lying, the hidden library was large, but it really only accounted for maybe a quarter of the size of Harry’s new trunk. There was still plenty of room for them to add to their collections.

Hermione had suggested that they keep the Slytherin collection together in one section of the new trunk. Tom had quickly agreed with her, and besides it would make it easier to go through it all later if it wasn’t mixed with the collection from the Room of Requirement.

All in all, Harry considered his second year at Hogwarts a success. He had managed to avoid getting sucked into the Ron vs Draco drama, gained a new friend and ally in Tom, and pilfered a treasure trove of knowledge from the ancient castle.

Also, he hadn’t managed to get himself caught in any other ‘private’ conversations with the headmaster.

His being a parselmouth had gotten out, so that wasn’t a _win_. But… he _had_ removed a giant basilisk from the school grounds, so that sort of made up for it in his opinion. 

On the train back, he and Hermione seal the compartment and retreat to the trunk again.

Tom was still in the new library when they got down there, as he spent most of his free time once becoming solid going through their new books. But he came out to join them when they called for him.

In the comfort of Harry’s home, they made plans for the summer.

Hermione will go home as usual. No, her parents aren’t meeting her on the platform. She’ll take a taxi. It should be easier this time since now she can shrink her belongings down to fit inside her pocket. Why so many kids push around those clunky trollies if they have this option, she doesn’t know.

Actually, yes she does. There’s a ban on underage magic. But Tom cleared that up for them. They had that in his day too. But that didn’t mean he didn’t use magic. It’s tied to the wand once the first year at Hogwarts officially begins and only applies to spells that are not on the approved list for their current year.

Jasper was already working with Harry since first year on wandless magic, and with Tom’s help they convinced Hermione to focus on that too.

“It’s easier for muggle-born,” Tom had said. “We learned about our magic before we even knew it was real. Before we knew wands existed. It comes more naturally to us. Wandless and wordless.”

Hermione won’t be staying at home for long though. She’ll spend two weeks with her parents, if they stay home long enough, but then she’ll come back to Diagon Alley and meet up with Harry.

He smiled to himself about it because she thought she would be sleeping on the couch. But he’s fully committed to getting her a bedroom of her own as soon as she is back to pick out the one she wants.

By the time the train stops, Harry has his cloak back out and his trunk in his pocket. He knew, logically, that Tom was safe inside. He’d made many trips around the castle with Tom inside already. But it’s still very strange to worry about him being the size of a tiny figurine in his pocket. Then again, there are witches and wizards who transform themselves into insects, so…

Yeah, it should be fine. He has an entire summer to look forward to, and he’s even more excited to start than he was the year before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not that I don’t absolutely LOVE Alan Rickman, because I do! However… I feel it needs to be said: Severus Snape is only 20 years older than Harry. That means, when Harry started at Hogwarts, Snape was only 31…. 
> 
> For real, Rickman was a badass boss and I will love him forever… but 31 years old he was not.
> 
> Thus, when watching the movies Alan Rickman is my Snape of choice. But when reading the books or fic, my brain comes up with someone else. I saw a Tumblr post with Louis Garrel as a suggestion once and for some reason my imagination said "YEP! That’s the guy! That’s your Snape"… So, yeah. Just thought I’d share.


	5. SUMMER BEFORE THIRD YEAR

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for the lovely comments! They're very encouraging, so I really appreciate them. As a token of my gratitude, please have a new chapter ahead of schedule!

Jasper was there to pick him up from the train station again. It’s sort of nice that he took the time for a second year in a row to come out and walk back together. Almost like the other kids rushing off the train to meet their families. Harry didn’t think he’d mind really if it becomes a _thing._

Once again, he checked Harry over for any tracking charms before they left the area. Even though Harry normally checked himself at school, it made Jasper feel better to look for the charms himself.

When Harry tells him about the big reveal to Hermione (that he left out of his letters), well… Jasper isn’t thrilled to say the least.

But he assured him that the vow was in place. And then he mentioned all the books that she helped him pilfer from the Hogwarts annals and is pleased when his friend very nearly loses his footing on their walk.

He’s hoping that makes up for the next piece of news he has to share. That he _also_ left out of the letters…

Instead of taking his trunk out of his pocket when they get back, he encouraged Jasper to get changed quickly so they can go to muggle London. Harry had already changed into his own muggle clothes on the train, wanting to save time. He has things to say that no witch or wizard should hear.

It only took Jasper a few minutes, and then they were off for The Leaky Cauldron.

A bus ride and several blocks of walking down some side streets, and Harry deemed them far enough away for a talk. Jasper knows the area well enough to locate a pub for some chips and he felt it sounded like the kind of talk he’s going to want a pint or two for.

“Ohhh brown sauce,” Harry purred, happy at the sight of the condiment. “Remind me to pick some of this up before we go back. I didn’t realize I would miss it.”

Jasper downed half the pint in one go. He already had the second one waiting. “So, how bad is it?”

“It’s not, honestly,” he promised around a mouthful of fried potato. “Well, you might think it is, but it’s fine.”

“Harry.”

Sometimes, he thinks that Jasper and Hermione are twin souls or something. They both have this way of saying his name that could mean so many things at once. But mostly it means that they aren’t in the mood to deal with any of his deflection, thank you very much, and could he just spit it out?

Well then.

“Long story short… I found a haunted diary that had a piece of a sixteen-year-old Tom Riddle stuck inside. Tom Riddle of course, being the Hogwarts student from fifty years ago who would eventually grow up and become Lord Voldemort. Hermione and I met him and worked out how to bring him back without hurting anyone. He’s alive and in my trunk right now. He’s been super helpful with studying and research. He liberated all the old books from Salazar Slytherin’s secret library for us, they’re in the trunk too. And we are all going to work together to make the Wizarding World better, and not kill or torture anyone.”

Jasper finished his pint.

And the second one.

Then called the bartender for a shot of whiskey and another pint.

“Jasper?”

He held a hand up until he had his new drinks in front of him and downed the shot without a second thought.

Even then, he still didn’t say anything. He took a chip, dipped it in sauce and shoved the whole thing in his mouth. Only after he’d chewed and swallowed did he speak.

“You said you knew who Tom Riddle was?”

“Yes.”

“And you still brought him back?”

“Yes.”

“Right, I want to talk to him. No. No, I don’t.” Jasper let out a big sigh, picked up another wedge but dropped it back to the plate just as quickly. “Yes, I do. But that can wait. Harry….. Harry. What _possessed_ you? Was it him? Did he actually possess you? I mean, I’m not worried about Hermione anymore. I thought she might be tied to Dumbledore before this, but if she’s going around making unbreakable vows and helping you raise the _devil himself_! What’s there to worry about, right?”

Harry was thankful the brief raised voice was drowned out in the rest of the sounds from the pub. Still, he knew it wasn’t going to be easy as pie for Jasper to agree to this.

He had to explain things quickly before this devolved any further, and he adopted as sincere and straightforward of a tone as he could.

“He’s not the devil yet, Jasper. He’s just a sixteen-year-old kid who lived in an orphanage in the middle of World War Two. I’m not saying he’s perfect. But he’s not a mass murderer yet. He’s a kid who had no friends in either world. The muggles hated him cause he was magic. And the Slytherins hated him cause he came from muggles. And the rest of the school hated him cause he was a Slytherin. Funny thing about that, he’s the Heir of Slytherin. And now we’re his friends.”

It was perhaps a sign of something good that Jasper didn’t run screaming from their booth. Although, he did slump down in his seat a bit, and his head drooped down onto his chest.

“I feel like I’m not old enough to be the adult here. I’m only nineteen for crying out loud.” Then he shot a look back up. “Harry, you can’t tell me you’re buying into this.”

“I am,” he promised his friend. Hopefully, he didn’t sound like a little kid. “Whatever Voldemort did, Tom hasn’t done yet. He said he was planning on killing his dad--”

Jasper’s arm flung out to the side. “Oh, cause that’s something a perfectly well-adjusted guy would do.”

“ _But_ he was put in the diary before that happened. And I’m not saying he’s a hundred percent well adjusted. Hermione doesn’t think so either. But she said I have ethical problems too, so… not the point.”

“What’s the point?”

“He hasn’t killed anyone. And he has the bonus of seeing what will happen if he does go down that path a second time. He won’t be at full strength for a while. He said a long time. So he’s not going to kick off the next war tomorrow or anything.”

Jasper shook his head, muttering, “Not tomorrow, but eventually.”

“No, I don’t think so. We’ve been going over the things we want to change and really, Jasper, it’s the same things you and I have talked about. I’ll have two seats on the Wizengamot in a few years. I think we can do this.”

No answer.

Harry soldiered on, “As far as the war goes, Hermione doesn’t think it ever stopped. Ron was bragging one day about the raids his dad was doing for the Ministry. He works there. Apparently, they’re still going after dark wizarding families. But like, they’re taking things from them. From their houses. And if anyone complains, they threaten them with going to Azkaban.”

“He said that?” Jasper looked disturbed, but at least it was a distraction from the whole… ‘ _Dark Lord_ ’ thing.

“Part of it,” Harry admitted. “But we asked one of the Slytherins about it. Nice guy, sort of quiet. He said his grandfather’s estate gets raided at least once a year.”

Jasper picked his pint back up for a swallow. “You’re talking with the Slytherins now? I thought they hated you.”

“Yeah, some of them started being decent when the whole parseltongue thing happened.”

Jasper winced at that, but Harry had told him about it right after it happened. Some of them had stopped glaring at him when he walked in a room. Most of them were still awful, like Malfoy. But a couple had become decent.

He gave his friend a few minutes where it was just drinks and food, but then he tried again. “Look, can you at least try? For my sake? I think if you spend some time talking to him, you’ll see that he’s not that bad. I mean, he’s arrogant, sarcastic, ridiculously smart… but he’s not evil.”

That got another sigh. “Only you Harry. Only you would go off to your second year at Hogwarts and come home with a stray Dark Lord in the pocket of your trousers.”

Harry latched on to that comment. “Oh, trousers. We need to pick up some things. Tom doesn’t have any clothes. He needs something to sleep in and wear around the place. I was thinking that we should probably keep to the muggle world when he leaves the trunk. Well, Hermione was thinking that, but it’s probably a good idea, right?”

Meeting Tom was not what Jasper had expected. It didn’t happen that first night. Even with the liquid courage, he needed a little more time to settle himself to the idea.

On the second night though, he felt mostly ready. Tom was his charming self, though he couldn’t look more like a teenager if he tried; curled into the corner of the couch ( _Harry’s_ normal spot) in a pair of lounge pants and a pullover. So that helped. It was the bare feet that really sold the whole non-threatening vibe.

But Jasper wasn’t to be so easily swayed. “Harry said you were haunting that diary. But you weren’t really, were you?”

Tom gave him a polite look of confusion. “I don’t think I understand.”

“You put a piece of yourself in there,” Jasper acknowledged. “I know what it takes to do that. And I know what that would make you.”

The confusion settled into delight. Though it looked a little more vicious than Harry had seen before. 

“You’re a horcrux,” Jasper announced. 

“What’s a horcrux?” Harry didn’t know that word, he couldn’t remember anyone saying it before. 

“I used to be,” Tom answered before addressing Harry, “It’s an object that houses a piece of a person’s soul. It’s very dark magic.”

He settled back into the couch before telling them both, “When I gained my body, that status changed. I doubt it would have worked if my other self hadn’t put such a large piece in the diary. But it was his first one, and we didn’t really understand how one would go about sectioning off a piece of their soul.”

Jasper interrupted, “First, meaning there were more?”

Tom nodded back, “That was the plan. I don’t know if he did it though. Like I said, there was a lot of the soul put in me. I don’t know how much was left to make more. I feel whole, so it couldn’t have been very much.”

“Well, that explains the absolute bedlam you turned the Wizarding World into,” Jasper mused.

“Hmmm. Yes, Harry gave me some of your old articles to read about Voldemort’s… let’s call them adventures. I can assure you, _bedlam_ was not the original plan.”

Harry wouldn’t call their conversation friendly, but it wasn’t the ice-cold hatred he’d been afraid of.

It took that whole first week for Jasper to warm up really, and watching the two of them sort out dinner, and then breakfast, and going through the heavenly extra library trunk… yeah, Harry was sure that by the end of summer, Jasper would be right as rain again.

Halfway through the second week, Harry got an owl from Hermione.

Her parents were leaving again. ‘Would Harry mind coming to her house to pick her up? Maybe he could get Jasper to bring him into the city?’

He didn’t mind at all. Jasper was busy, but he’d gone into London alone before, it was fine. He took his trunk with him when he left. It was easy enough getting past her parents when he got to the house seeing as they weren’t there. Hermione let him inside and took him upstairs to where she was packing.

“That looks like it’s for more than a short visit,” he told her, gesturing to the piles on the bed.

“It’s for the rest of summer” she agreed. “The owls should redirect the mail to your place. That is, if you and Tom don’t mind me staying.”

Which reminded him, he set the trunk down and enlarged it, calling for Tom to come up.

The older boy took one look around Hermione’s room, and saw how she was holding herself. She was putting up a good front, but it was obvious to both boys that she was upset.

Tom squeezed her shoulder on his way past and picked up some luggage from the bed. “These are ready to go?”

She gave him a quiet, “Yeah.”

Hedwig was still sitting on her bookshelf, but she swooped down to perch on Tom’s shoulder as he carried the bags down the stairs.

“What else is coming?” Harry asked. 

“My clothes, I was in the middle of packing them. If I shrink them down, they should all fit in this one suitcase.”

Harry helped her with that pulling out the clothes from the dresser and closet and laying them on the bed. He was removing some of the hangers when he asked, “How attached to this bedding are you?”

She stilled in folding a pair of jeans. “Umm. It’s my bed?”

“Yeah, I know. But if you could pick out something new, would you?”

“What?” She didn’t protest when he took the jeans from her and folded them himself before packing them into the suitcase. 

Tom answered for him, “He’s asking if you want him to buy you a new one.”

That got an immediate protest. “Harry, I can’t ask you to spend your money on me.”

He shot Tom an ugly look ignoring Hermione’s refusal. “You gave Hedwig treats, didn’t you? You were gone too long.”

Tom didn’t look concerned in the slightest. “Maybe I was just giving the two of you time to talk.”

“Nope, you gave her treats. Stop spoiling my owl.”

“I spent more time with her over the last year. She likes me better.”

“She likes you better because you keep giving her treats. She’s gonna get fat.”

Tom scoffed at the idea but turned back to Hermione, “This one’s next? What about your books?”

Harry glanced over at Hermione and saw her smiling a little at their antics. Good. It was better than the miserable face she had on earlier.

“They’re mostly muggle books,” she admitted. 

“So?”

That got her smiling for real. 

“Then yes, I want to keep them. Harry you should look at them too. They’re for the muggle school courses I told you about.”

He gave her a half-hearted nod at that, but then turned to look at how much of the room they were actually packing up. “Um, Hermione… Are you planning on coming back?”

She bit into the side of her lip for a second. Once Tom took one of the other bags downstairs, she straightened her shoulders and said determinedly, “Not if I don’t have to. They took my cat on vacation, you know.”

“I’m sorry, what?” _They took her cat?... Who takes a cat on vacation?_

“Crookshanks,” she nodded back. “My parents took him on vacation with them.”

“Isn’t he your familiar?”

She sorted through some of the books, even though they had already agreed to take them all. But it seemed to help her talk if she had something to do with her hands. “Not really. He ended up liking my mom more than he did me.”

Well, that settled it.

“You know you can stay with me as long as you want, right? Plus, we’re getting you your own room when we get back.”

Again, she declined the offer. “Harry, you _can’t_ spend so much money on me!”

Tom laughed, coming back up the stairs at just the right time. “I’ve seen his bank statements. I wouldn’t be worried about it if I were you. And when I get into the Slytherin vaults, none of us are going to worry about money ever again.”

Harry had asked Griphook a little bit more about those vaults. While the goblin didn’t give an exact amount, he did say that it was a considerably larger sum than Harry’s own vaults. Given that he knew how much was already in his vaults… it was obscene.

Tom and Jasper had been talking about that. It would probably be better for Tom to wait until he actually turned seventeen to access his accounts. Not that Gringotts wouldn’t protect his privacy or anything, but it might be better to hide his ‘existence’ until after he was definitely considered an adult.

It was possible that the fact he was actually much, much older than he appeared would be factored in and he could get access now. But it was another thing when they considered that Tom was only sixteen in his own mind.

So… they were waiting. 

Once the rest of her things were stored down in Harry’s living room, she locked her bedroom door on their way out. Her parents wouldn’t be expecting her back before the start of school anyway.

“Come on,” Harry called, urging her away from the house. “If we get back soon enough, we can get that trunk before they close.”

She was still hesitant, so he insisted it would be like an early birthday present. She had a counteroffer, because of course she did, and they settled on two birthdays and Christmases.

He had talked her down from five of each. 

“Harry!” Tom shouted from somewhere beyond his closed door. “Harry come out here this instant!”

Ohhhhhhhh, it was _way_ too early for this. Harry knew they had plans to go out on Diagon Alley today, but they had spent the last night trying to start an inventory on the Slytherin library. It was about a week after Hermione had moved in and all four of them had spent most of their free time cataloguing the books. None of them realized the time last night until Jasper started yawning. It had almost been two in the morning.

A quick check to his alarm clock showed it was barely past seven. Again, _in the morning_.

He heard Tom shouting. But it really didn’t sound dire. He sounded more pissed than worried. No. No, he would not get out of bed.

Then he heard Jasper mumble something, so apparently, he was awake too. Then, oh god, Hermione started laughing. Everyone was awake.

It was way too early to expect him to get up. But…. He started to smell food, so at least one of them had a generous streak. He could be persuaded with food and coffee.

Oddly enough, the tables at Hogwarts breakfast served coffee. The Dursley’s had never touched the stuff. But once Harry started drinking it in the mornings at school, he understood fully what addiction meant.

Jasper already had a healthy addiction when they met, and Hermione wasn’t close behind. 

He’d started stocking it in his trunk by the end of summer break after first year.

Harry stumbled into the front room, ruffling his hair. It was easily manageable as long as he kept it trimmed, but he still liked to mess it up from time to time.

“I expect sausage and coffee…” he warned.

“It’s a scramble stir,” Jasper politely informed him. “Eggs, peppers, sausage, and tomato. And toast.”

“And cheese,” he mumbled back in request.

Jasper went to the fridge to pull out the cheese with a sigh. “And cheese.”

The coffee was sitting on the table, right next to an empty mug for him. He was completely fixated on getting that into his system as quickly as possible when Hermione caught his attention. “Harry, look…”

He turned a dazed look to the occupant of the other chair she was pointing to. “Who are… Tom?!”

Sitting at his table, with shoulder length blonde hair was a furious Tom. Oh wow. Even his eyebrows were blonde.

“That color looks terrible with your skin tone,” Hermione helpfully pointed out.

Tom sent her murder eyes. “Harry, Jasper has taken liberties with my appearance that honestly, he had no right to do. And I can’t change it back myself, I tried. Tell him to fix this!”

Harry thought he deserved a medal for not laughing in his face. He turned back to his coffee but added, “I don’t know why you think he would listen to me. But… actually, why _did_ you change Tom’s hair?”

Jasper didn’t even look over. “He’s a carbon copy of young Voldemort. If any of the older generation see him, they might recognize him.”

“At least put my hair back to the length it was before!” Tom insisted. 

“No.” Jasper dished out plates that Hermione jumped up to help bring over. “You said you never kept your hair long before.”

“Yes, because I hate it.”

“Exactly, and anyone who could recognize you will have never seen you with long hair,” like he was talking to a particularly moody toddler. “For the love of… it’s a disguise Tom! You were already pushing it when you came into the shop for your new bedroom. What if someone had seen you? And walking around Diagon Alley? The Leakey Cauldron? It’s better if we at least _try_ to keep you concealed.”

Hermione agreed. “We should all do that actually. Not Jasper, but me and Harry definitely. Can you give me dark brown, without any frizz?”

Jasper grinned over at her. “Of course. Do you want it permanent or only for the day?”

“Let’s try it for the day. If I like it, maybe permanent.”

Tom took up his cutlery, having food in front of him was a nice distraction. “Not while you’re in school,” he told Hermione. “And mine had better not be permanent.”

Hermione wasn’t happy with the order. “Why not while I’m in school?”

“It becomes useless as a disguise if you look like that all the time.”

Jasper laughed, “So you _do_ know what a disguise is. That’s nice.”

Hermione hummed in thought “…good point. What about for Harry?”

Harry looked up from his coffee. He hadn’t even started on the eggs. “I don’t want _that_ ,” he said while pointing at Tom. It was successful in vanishing Tom’s improving mood.

“Jasper’s like your older brother anyway. If you matched his hair color others would probably just think you two are family.”

He shrugged back at Hermione. “Yeah, that’s fine.”

She finished eating before the rest of them and went back to her room for a quick shower and day clothes.

Harry had ended up having to convince her several more times that first day that really, he had more than enough money to cover a trunk of her own. She had picked one similar to Tom’s. It had a decently sized bedroom, bathroom, and a large closet. And decorating it all had been awesome for her.

Not so awesome for the three guys with her, who’d had to nearly wrestle her to the ground to make a decision between the lilac and periwinkle duvet covers.

She went with periwinkle, by the way. With lilac pillow covers and sheets. 

As for Tom… Harry was not at all surprised when he noticed the older boy selecting a familiar green color. But it was only a few pillows on top of a black and grey theme he had going on.

While at school, Hermione would sleep in her dorm bed. It was strictly based on the fact that she wanted the trunk that had the cabinet-like appearance (like Tom’s) versus the steamer storage (like Harry’s). But when they were in the Room of Requirement, she would of course have access to it again.

They tested the mail theory with Hedwig. Jasper had gone back to muggle London with the owl and sent a letter addressed to Hermione. It arrived in the trunk’s post box. Like a charm.

They had also replaced two of the shelving sections in the study with two more cabinet-style trunks. The first was that potions lab that Harry didn’t tell Professor Snape about. Tom was overjoyed with that one, but put his foot down by insisting on an explosion proof one.

Harry was mildly insulted. He honestly didn’t think he would be blowing anything up, but Jasper and Tom both pointed out that it was a simple addition that even Hogwarts enacted in their labs. 

There was enough room in there for probably about ten people to be working at the same time, but there was also a whole separate room for storing ingredients and finished brews.

By the end of the summer, Harry planned to avail himself of everything the local shops had to offer.

The second addition was a room for dueling and practicing new spells. Again, Tom had suggested it and Jasper quickly backed him up. Both of the Hogwarts students were limited by the trace on their wands, but it was as good a time as any to focus on shoring up their wandless magic abilities.

“Did we really need to start the day so early?” Harry asked.

Jasper at least had some sympathy. He was sporting bags under his eyes much worse than Harry. “Yes. We have a lot of shopping to get through and the stores should open in the next half hour.”

Tom had left to get ready shortly after Hermione, so he figured he should probably do that too. He settled for a trim-fitting grey day robe that wouldn’t hinder his satchel. It was a muggle thing to wear, but Harry liked being able to store his purchases all in one place on a shopping trip.

Plus, it had been his gift from Hermione this past Christmas. A brown canvas and leather messenger bag. It had a brand name that she liked. 

Harry knew the brand meant nothing in the Wizarding World, but Hermione had been proud of herself. Apparently, it hadn’t been cheap for a teenager. And she had a little smile every time she saw him using it.

“Wow, you look fantastic!” He told her when he came back out. And she truly did with her new hair. Very different, but it just seemed to fit her. She had it pulled up in a loose ponytail, something she said she’d always had a hard time with. It looked silky and elegant on her.

She preened under the attention. “You know my parents had my hair crimped before first year? It was the fashion of the eighties I guess, and my mum insisted on it. I always hated it.”

“I like your parents less and less the more you talk about them,” Tom called from the other side of the room.

He was giving Hedwig treats again! “Oi!” Harry shouted.

Tom dusted off his hands and shoved them in his robe pockets. “You should just obliviate them and be done with it.”

And of course they knew what that spell did. Lockhart….

“That’s something she can decide when she’s older,” Jasper calmly interjected. “A thirteen-year-old shouldn’t be encouraged to sever ties with their family. Now Harry, are you ready?”

“Do your worst,” he said, fluffing up his hair.

Jasper gave him a smirk and tapped out a quick glamour on his head.

Hermione smiled at them. “You definitely look related now.”

He darted into the bathroom to check, and sure enough, he had the exact same hair color as Jasper. He didn’t mind the look really. But like Tom, he preferred his own darker color that was more natural to him.

Eh, it was only for the one day.

It turned out to be quite an eventful day as they ran into the Weasley twins out in the shops. They’d been able to get through the morning without much notice from other shoppers, and likely appeared as two sets of siblings (Jasper-Harry and Tom-Hermione) out for a day-trip to the Alley.

They spotted the twins first, but Harry saw the moment the boys realized who they were seeing. It took no less than three rechecks for the twins to confirm it was them.

George was the first to say hello. “Hermione, you look…”

“Amazing,” Fred finished. “Are you keeping it?”

“How’d you do it? What spell?”

Harry introduced them to Jasper, who told them it was an easy spell from a hairdresser friend and that he was happy to share if they wanted.

George pouted a bit, “Yeah, for sure. If it weren’t for the Ministry, we could do it ourselves.”

“Is it permanent?” Fred asked.

“Can it be?”

Tom is still a bit wary of the twins when he is introduced to them, solely for their last name. So is Jasper, really. But both of them are calm and polite enough to pass as friendly. 

They come from Molly Weasley. Can they really be trusted?

As the twins were talking to Hermione and Harry, Jasper did a quick scan of them from behind. They both had tracking charms on them.

Fred noticed the light first. Then George. It was about to turn into a spectacle on the street before Harry jumped in.

“He’s just doing a look for tracking charms,” Harry whispered, hands up to try and keep them calm. “Someone at school has been placing them on me and Hermione for the last two years. Looks like they’re on you too.”

“I can nullify them if you want,” Jasper offered.

George was pissed. Fred pulled him to the side to whisper something in that weird twin thing they do sometimes. They’re only off to the side for a moment, but when they come back, they realize that George isn’t pissed at _them_.

“Change our hair please,” he asked. “Permanently. And yes, please remove the charms from me and my brother.”

“George,” Fred started. 

“No Fred. We’re fifteen. We can do this if we want.” His brother gave him a long suffering sigh, but nodded back over to Jasper.

“And then, Harry…” Fred hesitated.

George picked it up, “There’s things we should tell you, mate.”

Harry studied their faces, saw that both were very serious, not a joke or prank in sight. Then he looked up to Tom.

Tom was also studying the twins in front of him, but he returned a slight nod of his head to Harry. “Not here,” he said.

“Okay,” Harry agreed. “But we need to finish the shopping first.”

They agreed to meet at the Eternelle’s Elixir of Refreshments in an hour. That suited the Weasley boys just fine. They had been on their way to another shop when they spotted the group.

“Hermione, what’s next?” Harry asked, getting them back on track.

She had a list.

  1. ~~Clothes and wand for Tom~~
  2. ~~Quills, Ink, Parchment~~
  3. ~~Potions lab materials~~
  4. ~~Potions lab ingredients~~
  5. Menagerie for Hermione/Restock food for Hedwig and Keziah
  6. Groceries



“We only have the pet store and food shopping left,” she announced.

They ended up finding another cat for her. Honestly, she wasn’t sold on getting another, but when she saw a big box of kittens, she’d reached a hand down to play with them. One of the little ones, a tiny black thing with bright green eyes latched onto the sleeve of her robe and pulled itself up her arm.

“Hello,” she said with an amused smile.

The little kitten proceeded to crawl over her shoulder and drop into her open hood. Where it promptly curled up to take a nap.

If it hadn’t been so loud in there anyway, Harry would have probably gotten some ugly looks for the loud laughter that followed.

Jasper clapped his hands together. “Well, that’s that I suppose.”

Little Lissy is what Hermione called her when the shop worker said the name was Lissandra.

Harry turned to his newest friend. “You sure you don’t want to get one while we’re here?”

Tom gave him an odd look. “What do you think Keziah is?”

“Mine?” Harry asked, eyes daring Tom to answer.

“Is he though?”

“You can’t keep stealing my animals with food, Tom.”

“Hmmm. It seems to be working so far.” Tom, completely unapologetic about the whole thing, placed another bag of owl treats in Harry’s basket. 

After that it was just the groceries. With the four of them together, they made short work of it. Well, more like three. It had been a while since Tom had been shopping anywhere and things were very, very different than what he remembered.

Actually, he could honestly say he had never gone grocery shopping in his life.

He stuck with Harry for most of it. But it didn’t take them more than twenty minutes once they split the list up. Harry insisted on taking the produce section. He was becoming a bit of a snob in what he chose to cook with, he freely admitted that to anyone. 

They had time before they had to meet up with the twins, and it was a short enough walk that they dropped off the purchases at home before heading back.

They settled on a small bakery café that had tables in an out of the way area, but with enough room for the six of them to sit together.

Jasper spelled the area for privacy, and then happily cast the permanent hair change to both of them when they asked for it again. Now, instead of bright red hair, they had a neater cut of dark auburn. Still matching.

“Your bag’s looking a bit lighter there Harry,” Fred mentioned around a bite of his cheese tart. 

Harry was impressed. “Do you two notice everything?”

“Yes,” George grinned around his own bite of tart.

“Of course,” Fred agreed.

“And if your bag is empty from your shopping--”

“Then you’re staying somewhere nearby.”

“Unless you can apparate. We can’t do that yet.”

“But we’ll learn this year, for sure.”

Tom was still determined to be a bit reserved with them, especially when they asked his name again.

“I’m Tom, like Harry said before.”

“Just Tom?”

“Just Tom.” He said it with a smile, but it didn’t take a genius to realize that the friendly face wasn’t _actually_ friendly.

George ignored that. “You look a bit like a Malfoy, are you related?”

“No.” Impossibly, Tom’s voice got colder. 

Fred seemed smart enough to sense danger. He directed the attention back to him. “Well, ‘just Tom,’ how’d you meet these two?”

“Through Jasper,” he answered after a sip of his drink. “He and I are old friends.”

“You’re what eighteen?”

“Sixteen,” he corrected.

“You’re in school then?”

If Harry didn’t know any better, Tom was enjoying the little game. “No, I’m taught at home.”

“Guys, you said you had something you wanted to tell me.”

Fred gave the two older boys a cautious look and suggested maybe a private talk?

Tom shot that down quickly. “Harry will stay right here.” 

“It’s fine,” Harry assured them. “I tell them everything anyway. You might as well just tell all of us.”

Fred looked like he still wanted to be cautious, so George jumped in. “Dumbledore’s been around our house more. Last summer, and this one too. We haven’t even been out for a solid two weeks.”

“He’s up to three visits so far… in two weeks.” Fred had found his voice again. “It’s oppressive is what it is.”

“Too right it is. The summer break is for us students, and now that’s gone.”

Hermione got very curious at that. “Why would he be going to your home?” She asked.

“We don’t know for sure,” Fred answered, then looked over at Harry again. “But he’s been asking us about you.”

George nodded along, “Ron and Ginny as well. But he talked to them alone, we don’t know what it was about. And mums been saying stuff too. She was mad at Ron when we first got back. She keeps calling you Ron’s friend. And telling him that he has to be better.”

“We didn’t say anything, but after last year we didn’t think you were that close to little Ronny. Or Ginny.”

George scrunched up his face a bit. “Yeah, _Ginny_. Mate, she has pictures of you.”

Harry thought that was alarming, but it was Jasper who let out a shocked, “What?”

“Yeah, loads of pictures. We found them wrapped in a guy’s jumper in her wardrobe.”

“Harry, your missing cardigan,” Hermione whispered before addressing the twins. “Was it gray with a vertical, red stripe?”

Fred nodded, “That’s it.”

Hermione leaned closer to him. “Harry, that’s the one you lost right before Christmas. This is getting into stalker territory.”

“Mate, what’s happening here?” George asked. His brother jumped in right behind him.

“We’ve gone over it and over it, and there’s no sense to be made. We heard mum talking to Dumbledore about… you know who. But we couldn’t hear the rest.”

“But something’s going on. Ron and Ginny are getting to be little tyrants in the house.”

Fred gave a mirthless laugh at that. “Our darling little brother refused to eat what mum cooked the other night, and you know what she did? Cooked him something new. If we had tried that, she would’ve had us by our ears.”

“It’s just odd...” George added.

“Invasion of the Body Snatchers?” Hermione asked.

Jasper laughed, then added “Muggle film.”

When George and Fred still looked confused, Hermione asked “As in the cinema? Movies?”

Harry laughed, “We are so taking you two to muggle London.”

“I don’t like it,” Tom said, bringing them back to the topic of discussion.

“What, the film?” Harry asked.

“No,” he waved that away. “Dumbledore, and the Weasley woman. First stealing, and now these two children being pushed at you? I don’t like it.”

Fred looked alarmed. “What do you mean stealing?”

When Tom didn’t answer, Jasper stepped in, “Not to pry, but do you know your family’s financial situation?”

George snorted. “Funny you should mention money, Dad just won the Galleon draw. Says we’re going to Egypt this summer to see Bill.”

Fred picked up on the vibes from Jasper. “Are you saying that our parents actually stole that money?”

Harry gave them a grim look, “I don’t know if the draw was fake, but yes. Your mother has been systematically stealing money from my family vaults since I was a baby. A lot of it.”

That floored the two boys. No words, just an angry, thoughtful look and slow head shakes.

“We didn’t grow up with money Harry…” Fred offered in a quiet voice.

“Well then.” Tom sat up straight, apparently having reached the limits of his patience for taking the long way around things. “This is going to be unpleasant for you. Please sit still and maintain eye contact.”

He focused on Fred first, simply for being closer in the seating arrangement. “Legilimens.”

He’d done this with Jasper too. Honestly, Tom took paranoid to a whole new level. Jasper had been familiar with it, already planning on helping Harry improve his occlumens after his first year. He knew it could be a painless act, but Tom (being Tom) didn’t usually go to any trouble to make things pleasant.

Unless he was dealing with Harry. And Hermione. And now Jasper.

But at the time, he’d not had any trust built up. So he knew what kind of ‘ _discomfort_ ’ Fred, and then George were feeling.

“They’ve shared all they know. There’s no deception from either of them,” Tom announced by the end of it. 

“Of course there’s not.” George insisted. 

“But yeah, we could see how you might think…”

“Did she really take your money?”

“Georgie…”

Although Harry had never noticed it before, George certainly seemed to be the more emotional of the two brothers. He looked like he already accepted what they were saying was true and he was now on the verge of being heartbroken. Harry felt bad for him.

“Were you guys looking forward to the Egypt trip?” He asked. 

“Not really,” Fred answered for them both. “We just saw Bill last year.”

Jasper let out a tired groan. “Oh, good lord Harry, please don’t collect more strays.”

Harry had the gall to give his friend an innocent look. “What?”

Tom chuckled, but agreed with Jasper. “No. They should stay with their family. It’s a good to have eyes and ears there.”

“Not forever,” Harry swore. “Just for the summer.”

“How are you two with potions?” Hermione asked.

Harry loved Hermione. At least she was on his side, even if Jasper and Tom wanted to thwart his plans. They were _good_ plans. He always had good plans. 

“We pass those exams with flying colors every year,” Fred told her proudly. “We’re going into business when we’re old enough. Potions are an important part of that.”

Harry turned to his co-conspirator. “Do you think Professor Snape would include them in our summer thing?”

“We can ask…” She said with a grimace. Snape had been decent for their last interaction, but neither Harry nor Hermione knew if they were at the ‘asking favors’ stage yet.

George grinned. “Oh, Snape loves us. I mean he hates us on principle.”

“But he loves us too.”

Hermione sent back her own look of happiness. “We’ll send him an owl tonight. Hopefully, he says yes.” 

He did indeed say yes. And right before the rest of the family left for Egypt, Professor Dumbledore showed up at the Weasley Burrow.

Again.

He seemed to already know about their summer school project, and that they had been in contact with Harry.

They mention nothing of any future meetings with him, but they do confirm that they ran into him in Diagon Alley and he’d mentioned the advanced potions courses from Professor Snape. And then they’d received their own owl from the professor with additional books to study before next year.

They were very careful not to look him in the eye. Tom had warned them about that before they spilt up that day. 

He congratulated them on being so focused on their schoolwork, and kindly asked that they let him know if they do run into Harry again.

Not that they would, but they agreed to it just to get out of the conversation.

And they did indeed study their potions that summer. Jasper met them in Diagon Alley when they arrived and aside from the tracker scan, he re-fixed their hair to the color from before. It had been a permanent cast the first time, but it seemed Molly Weasley took offense to it and changed it back.

Harry joined the three of them and they went to the alley behind the trunk shop where, once again, Harry collected two unbreakable vows.

It wasn’t until they were down in the trunk, settling in on the new chairs Harry had purchased for the living room that they realized something was wrong.

“You know how you took the tracker charms off?” George asked Jasper. “What kind of charm could make me feel like I _need_ to tell Dumbledore about this?”

Tom was alarmed, and immediately moved in front of Harry and Hermione, new wand out on display.

Jasper held a hand up to stop whatever murderous thoughts were going through his head. He had them recount their conversation with the old wizard and picked up on the carefully worded ‘vow’.

“It’s not unbreakable.” Jasper told Tom. “Give me a moment. Hermione, can you find me that book on compulsion charms we had the other day.” She disappeared into the study and returned after a few moments.

Jasper looked at the twins closely. “Are both of you feeling this?”

“Yes.” Fred gritted out.

“Okay. I’m going to try something. Let me know if you feel that pressure lifting.”

It didn’t work with the first counter spell. Or the second. Or the fifth.

“Hermione, there was another one from the Come and Go Room. With the blue and gold cover. Can you get that?”

Finally, after another hour and several attempts later, the twins breathed a noticeable sigh of relief.

“We’re not going back there,” George whispered.

Fred was close enough to hear the whisper. But so were the rest of them, really. Even so, he whispered back, “Where, home?”

“Yes. Our own mother is involved in some seriously slimy dealings, and now we’re being _compelled_ to be spies? Fred, honestly, you can’t want us to go back there.”

“Where would we go?” He’d moved out of his own chair and budged up close to his brother in the other one.

Tom still kept Harry at a bit of a distance, but noted, “You just need better protections. Leaving there would simply alert the rest of them that we know about it. We aren’t ready for that yet. And we need to know what they’re up to.”

Except Harry didn’t like what that plan included. “He’s already upset about being turned into a spy, and now you want them to do the exact same thing for us?”

“Harry, if you know of a better way, tell me. But they’re in the perfect position for it. And it’s not like their mother would harm them, is it?”

“Maybe, maybe not, but I don’t know her. And neither do you. We don’t know how much risk we’re asking them to take.”

“It’s fine Harry,” Fred interrupted. “It’s not all that much time around them when you think about it. Most of our year is spent in Hogwarts. And we can always just take a day trip out here for the rest of the time. Seriously, it’ll be fine mate.”

Tom looked too smug for Harry’s tastes. “Happy you got your way?”

“Immensely.”

Harry shoved past him and threw himself down onto the sofa.

“Tracking, compelling, stealing…” Hermione started.

“What?” Harry was confused by the list. 

“Just making a running tally of things Dumbledore has done that are shady as fuck.”

“Hermione!”

“What? That word is appropriate in this situation Harry!”

Jasper took out a clicky pen he’d picked up in London. He could use a quill, but he liked the sound of the clicks.

He wrote down her three starting points. “What else?”

“Child abandonment,” Tom added. “He was Harry’s magical guardian.”

“Was he really?” Fred asked.

George came back from his slump enough to look over and remark in a hushed voice, “Wicked.”

“Banning books!” Hermione noted.

“That’s not illegal here,” Harry reminded her.

But she was never letting that one go. “Well, it should be.”

“Manipulation of minors,” Harry said for Jasper’s list. “He kept trying to ‘encourage’ me to go be adventurous first year.”

“Hmmm.” Tom agreed. “And the way he perpetuates the evil Slytherin image. He did that when I was in school too.”

Fred looked over at that. “I thought you said you were home schooled.” 

“I am now. But I used to be a Hogwarts student. I was in Slytherin. He was awful to us.”

“You’re home schooled but you live here?”

Tom just smiled back.

“I’m putting this on the fridge,” Jasper announced. “Add to it as you think of it.”

Tom nodded as Jasper passed by. “We’ll probably uncover deeper machinations once we get involved in the Ministry’s affairs. But none of us are in a position to do that right now.”

George was enthralled. “You guys are serious about this.”

Harry got up from the couch and went into his study, shuffling papers around on the desk until he found the one he wanted.

He handed the withdrawal summary he’d originally gotten from Griphook off to Fred, and settled back down in the little space between Tom and the sofa corner. There was plenty of room on the other side, since Jasper and Hermione were in the chairs on the other side of the twins. But it was the principal of it all. That corner was _Harry’s_ spot. He wasn’t forfeiting it to Tom.

Lissy got up from Hermione’s lap and walked her little body across the back of the sofa until she reached Harry’s shoulder. He snorted as she slid her body down the back, face first, until she was resting on his leg.

“Two hundred _THOUSAND?!”_ Fred shouted, gaining the attention of the rest of them. George took the paper from him for a better look. “But there’s no way!”

His brother agreed. “We don’t have this kind of money…”

“Except, you do,” Harry told them, as gently as he could. 

It was one thing to say it, but it was another thing entirely to see it on the parchment.

Fred and George had already brought most of their belongings for a summer stay, and Jasper had scanned all of them before they’d entered the trunk. But they ended up asking to go back for the rest. They weren’t ‘moving out,’ but they wanted a _full_ summer away.

It wasn’t like they had too many personal effects to begin with, but they wanted their journals that they kept. And the rest of their school supplies. More than just for the potions.

Despite how the rest of the school saw them, Fred and George were actually quite studious. They used their summers to read and study ahead for the next year… sort of like how Harry and Hermione had started doing. That way, once they got to school, they had more time for the ‘fun stuff’ that they really enjoyed.

Jasper accompanied them to the burrow and helped them pack up what they needed. While he was there, he did a little surreptitious investigating. For all intents and purposes, the house in the burrow looked very modest and humble. There was nothing that would immediately stand out as being ‘expensive’ or luxurious in any way.

The clock on the wall was worrying, though. Would it show exactly where they were when they left for Harry’s?

They did a test: Fred stayed behind as Jasper took George back to the trunk. He got the boy situated inside after checking them both over to ensure nothing followed them out, before flying back to the burrow (happy that he had the _entire_ day off work). Fred showed him that the clock displayed Diagon Alley for George the whole time. 

Jasper didn’t like that it was narrowed down so closely to their location, but at least it was still somewhat vague.

He helped Fred with the last of the bags and they were away from the Weasley home with plenty of course work and extra learning to keep them busy in the meantime. 

And that was how they spent the next several weeks.

During the day while Jasper was at work, the five teenagers spent their time going through the new Potions books in the lab, or sorting through the library organization, or reading through some of those books themselves.

Hermione had downloaded some muggle studies practice exams from an online course site (the twins and Tom didn’t engage on that) for her and Harry.

George and Fred set aside several books they found in the new library on charms and brews that they thought might help their future business endeavors. They weren’t letting go of their dream.

Tom actually supported them in that. Having an incoming source of funds was a good idea.

In return they happily took Tom off exploring Diagon Alley a few times while Jasper, Harry, and Hermione went food shopping on the weekends.

Fred absolutely loved Keziah and if the snake wasn’t resting, or curled up with Tom and Harry, he was crawling up Fred’s arm to relax on the newest human.

He’d received another talk from Harry about not eating kittens.

Lissy was fascinated with the snake though, and he was sweet enough to let her explore his tree whenever she wanted. He had recognized that she was a ‘baby’ and tolerated her curiosity when she began to hunt him around the house.

The tiny black cat seemed to have a bit more respect for Hedwig. She didn’t attempt to climb the owl’s tree. Not even once. 

Since twins didn’t bother returning home that summer, they needed sleeping arrangements. Those new chairs Harry got were easy enough for Jasper to transfigure into beds when needed.

The main room really was pretty big. So putting two comfy chairs on either side of the coffee table didn’t give it that crowded feel that the Gryffindor common room sometimes had.

Out of all of them, Tom probably liked the open space the most. Second only to the twins who had always felt cramped at home. Having the high ceilings in the trunk was a particularly nice bit of comfort for them.

Soon enough though, their summer was ending. Nothing made that more evident than their Hogwarts letters arriving in the post.

Oddly, the twins hadn’t heard from their mother all summer. Until that point.

She wanted them to meet in The Leaky Cauldron for assembly as a family before the trip to the station. Strange though… How did she know that they had everything ready to go? That they wouldn’t need to do any shopping?

It was possible she saw their personal belongings missing from their room. But then, why wouldn’t she say something before?

They had some money between the two of them and were strictly against Harry using anymore of his money on them beyond the free room and board (and potion supplies) that they’d already used that summer.

Tom thought it was considerate of them. But he was funny about money anyway. Harry’s money was definitely _Harry’s_ money. It wasn’t a community pot. But for someone like Tom, and actually for Harry too… the size of his accounts was beyond ludicrous. The amount he spent on something like a new school robe, or a new set of parchments and quills was a drop in the hat.

And with Tom expecting to be able to access the Slytherin accounts very soon, he seemed to approach it in the same way. Any money spent on the six of them was just… eh. He wasn’t concerned about it. It wasn’t like they waltzed around the shops throwing their gold coins around. But if a purchase could make their lives easier, he really didn’t care about the price tag.

Still, he thought it was a considerate sentiment from the Weasley twins after learning what their mother had done.

While it was possible for him to remain in Diagon Alley for the next school year, and probably the safer choice really… Tom chose to join the students in the school again. It would mean staying down in the trunk for pretty much the whole time. But he had a giant library, a potions lab, a practice room, and all the niceties of the home to keep him occupied. Plus, he had Keziah for company throughout the days while Harry was in class. And Hedwig, when she wasn’t carrying mail.

They wouldn’t all get to be together again (all, minus Jasper) unless they were up in the Room of Requirement, so the home would be a bit quieter in the evenings. But they did have plans to explore the Room a bit more this coming year.

It would actually be the one time Tom could leave the trunk safely. The library, of course, was still on their agenda. But the Room of Hidden Things, or Lost Things was another feature the twins wanted to explore.

A room full of discarded junk, or a room of undiscovered treasures… it was all in the eye of the beholder.

By the end of the summer, they were ready. They had studied ahead, and they had a plan for the year. They were as prepared as they could be, and anything they forgot to stock up on could be sent by owl post while they were away.

Harry made sure he had the necessary ingredients for a birthday cake for Hermione, and he had already purchased two new brooms for the twins for Christmas (though he kept those hidden in his bedroom).

Harry’s own birthday was spent with his friends on a picnic out to the countryside. He brought Keziah and Hedwig out with them for some sunshine and they picked a nice spot on a remote little island in the middle of a lake.

Really, the lake was more like a giant pond, and the island was barely bigger than the size of the main trunk’s floorplan. But Jasper had bought Harry a gazebo tent for the trip, and of course they had the trunk for bathroom visits.

But it had been good to get away from their normal daily life for a bit without the need to _disguise_ themselves in public.

Tom had worked with all of them on their occlumency. Jasper had helped, but Tom was clearly the superior wizard with that skill.

Fred and George had undeniably found the prospect of wandless magic to be a bit more difficult than Hermione and Harry, but they practiced it diligently whenever time allowed. They were improving rapidly, impressing their housemates with using it to set the table at meals. 

With one week left before they had to board the train, they were as ready as they could be. 


	6. THIRD YEAR AT HOGWARTS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promised a chapter this week... and here it is! All 17k+ words of it. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

“George,” Tom called from the study.

The boys had shifted two of the chairs to face each other and were engrossed in their readings with their feet up in each other’s lap. It was surprising they weren’t actually conjoined some days.

They looked up as Tom came out to stand at the coffee table. “I want you to wear this.”

“That’s not attractive.” George drew a face at the necklace dangling from Tom’s hand.

Tom took a deep breath, but somehow managed to refrain from rolling his eyes. “It doesn’t need to be visible,” he told the younger boy slowly. “It just needs to be around your neck.”

Harry, having been interested in the exchange so far, held out his hand from the couch. “What does it do?” He asked after George handed it over.

“They’re targets now,” Tom told him. “I have one for Fred too.”

“Where did you get them?” Harry turned it over in his hands. It looked like a bunch of silver strings all wrapped around a barely visible orb in the center. But that orb was glowing just a bit, the same shimmering blue that he’d seen in some of their spellwork.

“Books weren’t the only things we took from Salazar Slytherin’s room, remember?” Tom answered. “But Jasper got me the chains for them from Borgin and Burkes. We spelled them to resist persuasion for the wearer. It won’t help with the trackers or anything like that. But….”

“But our own mother might be trying to control us,” Fred offered, fingering the second one Tom handed down to him. “So, we need extra defense.”

Tom was pleased with the input. “Yes. Precisely.”

George nodded at the whole thing. “Well, toss it back over then. We’ll wear them from now on.”

They had a simple evening for their last night of the summer. It had been a busy time, but it was nice for them all to get comfortable with each other and learn how to coexist.

For example, whoever was first up made sure the coffee was ready for the rest. Since George and Fred absolutely refused to accept Harry purchasing them their own room, the three of them learned how to split up bathroom times amongst themselves.

In the evenings, Hermione and Tom preferred to wear slouchy lounge wear. Mainly because it was comfortable, and for Tom it had something to do with him not having the luxury to wear warm, cozy sweats in his youth.

But the point was, that once the loungewear was on, it would take a force of nature to get either of them to go back out. They could be starving with no food in the house, and they would still have to think really hard about whether it was worth the hassle.

They had all learned pretty early that Tom just had a way of speaking sometimes that was very authoritative. He didn’t set out to be rude (Harry didn’t _think_ he did), and had no problem elaborating on something if they asked. But when a decision needed to be made, he did so swiftly and with a tone of finality about it that the younger teens didn’t really balk at too much.

Jasper went along with it for the most part, but Harry had seen him taking quiet pleasure in disagreeing with Tom sometimes. He was convinced Jasper did it just to test the limits of Tom’s practiced civility most days. 

Another lesson learned: When Harry was focused on his potions in the lab, sometimes it would take a significant amount of cajoling to get him to come out for lunch or dinner. And when he _was_ pulled away in the middle of a brewing binge, he was rarely in a good mood about it.

Mostly, they chose Tom to go convince him.

It had the benefit of being the option with the highest chance of success, but it also had the secondary benefit of providing the rest of them with entertainment when the two would bicker back and forth about it for the next hour.

On one of those instances, Tom politely waited until he was at a good stopping point, then physically lifted him off the stool and marched him back to the dining table where their dinner had been set out and the others were already waiting.

Hermione and the boys had all recognized over the summer that Tom was practically the only person who could place a casual hand on Harry, or even squish in next to him on the couch and not have Harry shy away.

They didn’t take it personally. And they noticed Tom was like that about being touched as well. Sometimes Jasper too. Hermione wrote it off to being an orphan thing with no family and very little positive physical touch as a child.

Bottom line, Tom was who they sent in to enforce mealtimes. 

The only time this strategy didn’t work was when Tom had joined Harry in the lab for brewing. He was familiar with the material Professor Snape had given to them, and would spend much of the time in there making adjustments and corrections to a lot of the formulas in the books. It wasn’t that they were wrong necessarily, just that they could be better. 

They each had their own little things. Quirks and whatnot. Hermione gave in to her hatred of frizzy hair one evening and begged Jasper to make the charm permanent for it to be smooth. He had laughed at her pitiful face and immediately complied.

Jasper himself was happy to have two people now who came from the muggle world instead of just Harry. Truth be told, Harry hadn’t been allowed out much when he was living with the Dursley’s, so it fell to Jasper and Hermione to introduce the other four to most of the sights and sounds.

Tom loved the cinema. Truly. But only half as much as George and Fred did. They went out for a showing every Thursday when Jasper was off from work.

If they left early enough in the day, they went exploring in the city. Records were something that seemed to crossover between both worlds, so they picked up quite a few of those.

And the first time the twins saw a guy with a bright green mohawk, chains and piercings everywhere, and a general ‘punk’ look about him, they were intrigued.

Hermione immediately gave them both a stern, “No.”

On the other end of their group, Tom was somewhat scandalized with some of the female attire. “No self-respecting woman would reveal so much in public.”

Fred and George were actually sort of on his side with that one.

Hermione spent the rest of that trip embroiled in a debate on women’s rights, female empowerment, and freedom of expression. Though even she agreed that there was a certain lack of ‘classiness’ about them. But that was their choice.

Mobile phones were an amazing concept to Fred and George one day when they were taking a slow stroll through a park. “You mean to tell me, that the girl standing up by that lamp post just there can reach into her pocket, pull out that little device, and _call_ someone two hours away?”

Hermione smiled back serenely. “No, I’m telling you that girl can pull out her phone and call someone _on the other side of the globe_ if she wanted.”

“Wicked…” George was intrigued. So was Fred. 

“You want to go get some books on telecommunications?” She asked them.

“ ** _Yes_** ” they said in unison.

Tom had been interested in the device as well, he’d just been quieter about it. “I wonder if it could tap into the floo network?” He mused.

“Probably not the way they are right now…” Jasper had already thought about that a while back.

He and Hermione, and for the most part Harry too, had both perspectives to mesh together in their heads. They had the Wizarding World that came full of magic but was behind the times in so many ways. And they had the muggle side of things that had modern technology to try and make up for its complete absence of magic.

They belonged to both worlds. And while the three of them were more comfortable in the Wizarding World, there were certain things that they sometimes missed.

Like mobile phones. And modern cameras. Video recorders. Computers…. 

Fred was still focused on the mobile phones. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t modify it for the Wizarding World.”

“Imagine it,” George had stars in his eyes. “We would be the first ones to make it.”

“We would be famous.”

Tom definitely liked the inventor streak the twins had. He got sucked into their journals the first time he saw them, looking over their ideas and making suggestions for their ‘future products.’ This new concept of a ‘mobile phone’ that didn’t require someone to be near a fireplace… brilliant. 

Would it work from inside the wards in the trunk? The possibility of something like that was as foreign to the twins as magic might be to a muggle. But it was a very curious thing. Yes, certainly something to think about. 

Hermione and Jasper shared a look. “So… let’s go to the bookstore?”

Jasper grinned, “Yes, let’s.”

Fred and George loved the muggle bookstores, especially the giant ones. Though, of course, not as much as Hermione and Jasper. Actually, Tom was probably a close third behind the two bookworms.

He had approached his decades-long knowledge gap in muggle events with a fervent passion. They did leave the store that day with books on electricity and telecommunications. But they also left with more books on military battles and the darker side of world history. 

With their summer work however, they didn’t really have all that much time to map out the logistics behind such a thing. That’s okay, Tom told them. He would have plenty of time throughout the days while they were in classes.

On the day of the boarding, the twins packed everything up and headed out to meet their family at The Leaky Cauldron.

It was probably expected that Hermione and Harry would come too, but they’d never confirmed for their mother that they spent the summer with them, much less knew where they were.

Hermione and Harry arrived early on the platform, ahead of the rush, and picked the back compartment like they’d done before. Fred and George knew to meet them there once they arrived, but that wouldn’t be for another hour at least.

They went back down below to relax until then, and when the time came, Hermione went up alone to welcome the two older boys inside after putting the wards back up. It took a lot longer than she thought it would, but they turned up eventually.

Unfortunately, the meeting up with the rest of their family was not a comfortable one.

“We expected you here over an hour ago,” Molly had said in greeting.

It was only seven in the morning. Fred said as much.

“Well, you’re here now. Is it just the two of you? Where were you staying? With a friend from school? You know your father and I like to meet your friends before you run off with them. And you had that schoolwork to get done for Professor Snape too. Oh, he’ll be so disappointed you didn’t finish it. Really boys. When a professor assigns you a task, it’s a bit more important than spending time with friends over the summer break.”

Fred jumped back in and very simply explained that they had in fact been working on their summer assignment. They were in a friend’s lab brewing the potions they were expected to learn.

She didn’t have much to say on that. But then Ron announced that he had a new wand, wasn’t it so great?

“I didn’t think there would be enough money to buy you a new one,” George noted.

Molly interrupted that they just enough left over from the Galleon Draw to see to it when they got back. And that reminded her that, “Bill was so disappointed you two weren’t with us for the trip. He was hoping to show you around his new dig site. Well, Ron and Ginny enjoyed themselves at least. That’s something.”

Yes, not to forget Ginny. She hauled her trunk into the main dining hall of the inn and sat for some breakfast. She seemed happy enough to see her brothers, but immediately started asking them if they’d seen Harry over the summer. After that first time, of course. And oh, was Hermione there? She was from a muggle family, so probably not, right? But was she? Did they seem close?

Fred took that one by again stating they had simply been working on their potion’s books from Professor Snape. They didn’t really spend a lot of time trying to figure out if Harry and Hermione were _close_.

Ron thought doing any extra work for that ‘dungeon bat’ was a ridiculous idea. And he said so loudly. Molly gently hushed him about it, and then turned back to the twins to lay out her expectations for the coming year.

They were to make more of an effort with their brother and sister. She wouldn’t have the family not being together at Hogwarts. George protested this idea, saying that Ron and his friends have something of a mean streak at the school.

Ron was offended and denied that vehemently. Ginny and Molly immediately came to his defense. Their father sat at the end of the table, watching everything, but not engaging in any of it.

Molly wasn’t having it. They were to stick with their brother and sister on the train to Hogwarts. And in school, as well.

Molly, Molly, Molly… the boys could feel their charms from Tom heating up a little on their chests. He’d told them to expect that reaction if there were ever compulsions being attempted on them.

They’d spent the summer understanding that their mother had been participating in questionable behavior. But that moment was the first they had actually witnessed (or felt) it for themselves.

Fred had grabbed George’s hand and gave it a squeeze to keep him quiet. He could see the fire in his brother’s eyes. Fred nodded back to their mother, but neither of them said anything further.

And they didn’t say anything once they were on the train either. 

Ron had started boasting about the trip to his friends about twenty minutes after the train took off, they used the distraction to slip away.

Ginny had tried to follow, but they put a sticking charm on one of the car doors as they made their way to the back of the Hogwarts Express. After their own mother attempted to _compel_ them, they weren’t at all inclined to follow her wishes.

After that, it was a typical train ride for all intents and purposes. They played card games at the table for a while and had one of the records Tom had picked up playing in the living room. Eventually, Fred and George decided on a quick nap on the couch, while Hermione and Harry chose to double check the labels on their potions in the lab.

All four of them had completed the brews in their books and had stored them in individual vial boxes to be able to present to Professor Snape when they got there.

The boxes had come from Jasper, an early Christmas gift for each of them, including one for Tom, with their initials monogramed on a sliver plate on top. Soon enough, the train whistled it’s one-hour-till-arrival warning.

They dressed in their robes, Tom happily stayed in his comfy clothes since he was staying below, and went top-side. They each had their ‘Hogwarts Trunks’ stored in the compartment to avoid arousing any suspicion.

“Well, that’s some sad weather to show up in,” Fred mentioned while he gestured out the window at the harsh and steady rain.

George agreed, “Feels a bit colder in here too.”

And then the lights went out.

“Hermione, are the wards still up?” Harry asked, but he could feel that they were. The temperature plummeted further, and they watched transfixed as the window started freezing over.

“That’s not normal.” George looked back at Harry and then froze at the sight in the doorway. The wards had been there, but even so, the door was open now and standing, or floating right there was something out of his nightmares.

“Harry…” George made a grab for his friend’s shoulder.

As soon as Harry turned to look it was too late. The thing was in his face and bringing out the worst of the worst from his mind. Even with the work he’d done with Jasper and Tom, it was all useless.

Every night he went to bed starving and huddled on a cushion for a mattress. Every night he froze in the winter without a blanket. Every time he’d been hit with a hand, a fist, a belt. Every time one of those cut him deep enough to leave scars.

The times when he was really little and he didn’t understand why no one in the house was kind to him. The times when his teachers didn’t believe him. When the other kids called him a freak. When they chased him through the halls. When he never thought he’d be anything but alone and cold.

That was nothing compared to this.

He saw enough to know the rest of them were being attacked too. But then the thing hovered over him again and it was just so cold and dark, and he would never be okay again.

And then there was a light. It was so bright that it hurt to look at, but the coldness was still there. He heard someone screaming, and everything went black.

He came back slowly and his friends were all there, watching him. They looked concerned. But then some strange man was putting chocolate in front of him and telling him to eat.

“Harry, are you alright mate?” George asked. He sounded scared.

He swallowed around the food in his mouth, but it was slow going without a drink. “What was that?”

“ _That_ was a dementor,” the man answered.

Hermione introduced him as Professor Lupin, their new instructor. He didn’t stay long, but Harry was thankful he had been there to stop it.

As soon as he was gone, Hermione put the wards back up and helped Harry down the stairs. Fred and George would stay up top in case someone came looking for them. They still had a good chunk of the hour till they got to Hogwarts seeing as the train had stopped during the attack.

Tom was already getting up when the door opened.

“What happened?” He hissed out, gently taking Harry from her hold.

She looked shaken still. “Dementors.”

“ _On the train?!_ ”

And that was as much standing up as Harry wanted to do just then. It was fortunate that Tom had a good grip as he felt his legs go out from underneath him.

“Bring that chair over,” Tom ordered with a nod towards the fireplace. Hermione gave it a tap to up the heat a bit after putting one of the chairs right in front of it.

Tom led him over, half dragging him along, and gently sat the two of them down. He pulled Harry backwards, so he was snug up against his chest and just held on while the younger boy warmed up.

“Harry, do you want anything?” Hermione asked, keeping her voice light and soft. “Something to drink maybe?”

He raised his head enough to look at her. “Water.”

She was quick to get him one of the little glass bottles they kept in the fridge. Tom took it from her and murmured to Harry to, “Take small sips, not too much.”

He lost interest after a few swallows and Tom wordlessly floated the bottle up to the mantle.

“Come back and get him when the train stops.”

And that was as clear of a dismissal as anything. She quietly shut the door and went back up to ride it out with Fred and George.

“There you are now. You’re safe here Harry, I’ll keep you safe.” Tom whispered into his hair, arms still holding tight.

And he did feel safe. The heat from the fire, the pressure of Tom’s forearm against his chest, another wrapped around his waist, and the solid warmth of him against his back lulled Harry into a warm, fuzzy doze for the next forty or so minutes.

He took the carriages up to the castle once they arrived, his friends never left his side. But they could see that he was ready to pass out all through the feast. He barely touched the food.

When they finally got into the dorms, Fred and George wasted no time helping Harry get his luggage sorted. The rest of Harry’s dorm mates, including their brother, were still in the common room talking about their summer adventures so they had a little bit of time.

Fred was still concerned though. “Can you put up the wards once the curtains are closed?” 

He gave them a light glare but dropped it when he saw the worry etched across their faces. “I’ll be fine. I just need to sleep.”

George couldn’t seem to help himself for a second. He darted forward and gave Harry a hug. And maybe it was a testament to how exhausted he felt, but he didn’t tense up.

Fred gave him a pat on the shoulders, and they bid him a good night.

Silencing charm, repulsion charm, privacy charm, locking charm. Down the stairs, through the door, and there was Tom again. Waiting for him.

The lights were off except for the fireplace, and it just looked like _home_ so much he felt himself tearing up a little.

“Come here.” And there were Tom’s arms again, wrapping around and keeping him safe.

“I need to change, but… can you… can you stay with me tonight?”

He felt Tom huff a laugh into his hair. “Finally learned how to share your things?”

Harry snorted an ugly sound; he was too exhausted for anything else.

“I’ll stay.”

“Thank you.” But Harry hadn’t stepped back yet. He didn’t move at all, especially when Tom started talking again.

“Back when I was little… in the orphanage. It would get cold at night. The heating in that building was horrible, but at night it was so cold sometimes. Usually, we slept two or three to a bed when it got like that. But by the time I was eight, I was moved into my own room. There was no one to share a bed with. I used to put my pillow over my feet to try and get more warmth. It was never enough though.”

He didn’t lift his head from where it was plastered against his friend’s chest. But he found the energy to reward the moment of sharing with his own version of cold nights at the Dursleys.

“They gave me a towel. The house got cold at night, but probably not as bad as what you had. And the cupboard was small, so it was better to keep some of the heat in. But I had a cushion and one of those big beach towels, and my clothes. I had a whole layer system with the clothes and then the towel and then the coat.”

Tom gave him a tight squeeze, “Come on. Get changed and let’s go to sleep.” He closed the fireplace with a simple spoken command and followed after Harry to the bedroom.

It was only after they were dressed down and huddled close under the blankets that Harry dared to speak again. “Dumbledore said the dementors would be staying here at Hogwarts this year… I hate this.”

Tom pulled him in closer and spooned in behind him. “Shhh. It’ll be okay. I promise.”

“You can’t promise that.”

“I promise. Did you set the alarm?”

“Yeah.”

“Then sleep, Harry. All you need to do right now is sleep.”

He really didn’t see how that was going to be possible. Not with what happened on the train, and not knowing that those same Dementors were just outside the dorm walls. But even after thinking that, Harry was asleep in mere minutes.

Dumbledore apparently figured out that he wasn’t all that welcome getting close to Harry. That only made things more interesting when the old man decided to bypass Harry altogether and went for Hermione.

They’d barely been back a full day when he pulled her aside after breakfast to ask her about her summer.

All things considered, it’s pretty obvious that where she goes, Harry goes. They probably should have expected he would pry into their lives before that moment. Digging for information with all the subtlety of a bull in a china shop. He does it under the guise of inquiring about their extra potions studies, and asks if they’d spent any time with the Weasley twins that summer.

She admits that they ran into them in Diagon Alley, but doesn’t elaborate. He tells her that he thinks Ginny would be a nice friend for her to have. And Ron. She didn’t really agree but didn’t tell him to bugger off either.

She’s learning how to be conniving from the boys (all of them really).

After that unfortunate meeting, the four of them made their way to Snape to turn in their potions. Classes don’t actually start on their first day back, thankfully. They are typically provided three days to get settled back in. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. But none of them wanted to wait.

He was flabbergasted they had completed them all. “How did the four of you get access to a lab?”

They fibbed a little (George did) and alluded to having a friend with a lab. Of course, he didn’t mention that the friend with the lab was none other than Harry, who was standing right next to him. 

“And you did these yourselves? Did you keep notes?” They did. They worked together, but they all completed the brews with individual vials to go along with them. There are twenty-eight in total, seven from each book.

Snape studied the two third-years. “You two reviewed the Weasley’s books as well as your own?”

“Yes.”

“These were sixth- and seventh-year books.”

“Yes, Sir.”

He’s just about confounded by their achievement but recovered well, announcing with a haughty note in his voice, “You will rebrew them. In class, under my supervision. You will come to your assigned lecture hour at the beginning of each week where you will be given a list of the potions I expect from you by the time that week is up. What the four of you have done shows enormous potential in becoming potions masters.”

Hermione was flattered with the praise. “Like you Sir?”

“Quite. If you can replicate them individually without assistance from each other, we will develop a new syllabus that will prepare the two of you to take your O.W.L.S. by the end of this year.

“As for you two,” he said, turning to Fred and George. “You both passed your exams with and E last year. I expect O’s on your O.W.L.S. this time. You _will_ apply yourself to this field, or I will drop you from any extra assistance.”

He stared hard at each of them in turn, “I will not dedicate my considerably limited time to the four of you only to watch it be wasted.”

“We understand Sir,” Hermione replied with the utmost respect, getting a nod back from the professor.

“Show me you can earn O’s with them and we’ll begin additional work towards your N.E.W.T.S. over the next summer break.”

He wants five potions a week. Starting from the first book, until they have covered all of them. It will take just over a month before they can start on new material. 

That being said, he does tell them to start with one new potion. And even encourages them to spend the full first week on it. It’s a potion to prevent werewolves from turning on the full moon.

Odd, but okay.

Hermione’s birthday came around pretty quick, and for once she celebrated it with her friends. They had all pitched in on a gift for her; a small, beaded wrist bag that had an expanding and featherlight charm placed on it, much like the magic used on the trunks.

It was rather fancy looking, but she used it often. All things considered, it made it easier for her to carry around not only her school supplies, but also several books of interest from the Room of Requirement.

About that room, the twins were amazed.

However, they could only go to the grand library so many times before they started getting restless.

“Come on, Hermione,” George wheedled her at mealtime one evening. “We’ve been surrounded by books for weeks and weeks. And you and Harry spent all last year up there. What about the treasure?”

“Yeah, at least let us take a look at the place,” Fred added.

It wasn’t difficult to convince her really. They got to have fun with each other over the summer, and even being back in the castle they still found time on the weekends to spend together. But they really had been going and going on the studying.

It was important. They all agreed on that. But why not spend a weekend or two exploring the Room of Hidden Things? It would be like going to a giant store filled with (potentially) amazing things they didn’t need to pay for.

“Did you ask for lost things or hidden things?” Harry asked that Saturday when the four of them were standing outside of the forming doors.

“Ummm… Lost, I think?” Fred answered.

When they’d joked about it being a big room filled with piles of things, they hadn’t really considered that the room would give them exactly that. But as soon as they closed the door behind them, they were overwhelmed by the daunting sight.

Piles and piles, so much higher than they would have imagined.

Of… things.

There were still books, but there were also trunks, and clothes, and old brooms. True enough, a lot of it looked useless. But they wouldn’t know until they got started.

Tom came out to join them, happy to stretch his legs. And just as happy as the rest of them to practice a wordless floating charm on the items that surrounded them.

Slowly, very slowly, they began sorting through piles. Each of them spread out in the room and took their own pile (heap, mound, tower? Seriously, they were enormous) to pick through.

“All the clothes in one area, yes?” Hermione called.

She got back shouts of agreement. And quick enough, the five of them started floating items into a few purposeful piles.

They made one for clothes, yes. But they also had one for books (that got an eyeroll from George), furniture got stacked neatly in an empty corner of the room. And how exactly one goes about losing a bed, none of them knew. But there were more than a few of them.

They spent all of Saturday in there, breaking for food and bathroom visits without actually needing to leave the room. But they figured curfew was still in place, so they went back to the Gryffindor dorms only to return for the entirety of their Sunday.

By the end of the two days, they realized they would probably never need to purchase journals or parchments again. Or quills for that matter. Apparently, people lose a lot of those. Same for potion vials. And socks.

Hermione agreed finally that they should probably devote more than a weekend to the room. Harry felt that might have something to do with the pretty new coat she’d found. But he was happy for the change of plans regardless.

Sometimes they are the ones to open the room, sometimes Fred or George. Sometimes they just ask it for misplaced or missing things, sometimes they do go back to the big library.

Harry noticed Tom carrying a small box down into their trunk one day when they were exploring the Room. He waited to ask about it until that evening when they were alone and was a bit surprised that Tom seemed a little reluctant to admit to it.

Usually when one of them found something exciting in the Room, they quickly shared it with the others. Tom himself had found a time turner tucked in amidst the clutter. It was always fun when they found ‘treasures’ so whatever made the older boy want to hide this one… Harry wanted to know.

It took a little while, but finally Tom explained that it was another horcrux. Like the diary had been.

“There’s two of you?” Harry asked, slightly alarmed… mostly intrigued.

“No,” Tom told him with a fond but amused smile. “This one isn’t awake. I checked. But it is… me. Older me. I can feel it.”

“Do you want to try and wake it up?”

He shook his head slowly, staring at the box. “Not necessarily. This isn’t an object I had when I was sixteen. This diadem. So that means he… I—he made more than just me.”

They knew it was a possibility. But Tom had said that a lot of the soul was already inside of him. That there wasn’t much left to split again. Harry had sort of been banking on that being the case.

So far there was the wraith, Tom who came from the diary, and now this diadem.

“I need to talk to someone who knew me after I left school,” Tom announced. “Someone I would’ve trusted.”

Harry didn’t really like the sound of that. “Please tell me we aren’t going to track down your other self’s followers. I don’t think I’d want to meet any of them really.”

That had Tom laughing. “First I would need to know who they were. The ones not in Azkaban, at least. But we need to know how many more of these there are. And we need to talk to the goblins.”

“Griphook? Why?”

“Goblins know more about soul magic than most wizards could ever hope to.” Tom put the diadem back in the box, closed it tight, and placed it far up on one of the shelves in the Slytherin section of their library. “They make some of the best healers because they’ve studied soul magic and body magic for centuries. If one of us is ever truly injured, we’d have a better chance at Gringotts than at St. Mungos.”

“Going to the goblins about the horcrux… isn’t that going to make it pretty obvious who you are?” Harry asked. “I thought we were going to stay quiet about that.”

“We’ll need to at least tell Griphook. I’ll need him to authenticate my inheritance anyway.” Tom waived it away like he’d already considered the eventuality.

They would need to talk more about it, Harry knew. Even if they didn’t take the issue to the rest of their group, Harry still wanted to discuss it. Eventually… someone who was against them was going to discover who Tom was. He was just hoping they could delay that for a while.

But it was ultimately Tom whose safety would be in jeopardy. It was always going to be his choice whether or not to bring someone else into their biggest secret.

For all that they tried, the four students couldn’t avoid their common room forever. It was awful though, when they did spend time there. Most of the discussions they overheard were about (directly or indirectly) Harry.

For example: Harry’s godfather. Which was interesting since he didn’t even know he had one. But there in the whispers, Harry learned of Sirius Black and his recent escape from Azkaban.

Actually, if he could get over the annoyance that came with listening to the gossip, the common room was a good place to overhear a lot of things.

“Did you know he’s the one that killed his parents?”

“I heard he murdered a bunch of muggles.”

“He did it for you-know-who. He was secretly one of his followers.”

“I wonder if his parents were dark too.”

“Noooo, surely not.”

“Well… he _is_ a parselmouth. What’re the chances Potter’s like his godfather?”

“Maybe the sorting hat messed up and he was supposed to be in Slytherin.”

“He doesn’t spend any time with his own house, that’s for sure.”

“What about Granger and the twins?”

“Yeah, but they don’t count. It’s not like they’re real Gryffindors either, is it?”

Then again… some things just weren’t worth the headache they brought.

He had other things to focus on anyway. Like the advanced potions class with Professor Snape, and the new Defense class that actually showed some promise.

Though anything would’ve been an improvement from last year.

And Hermione had signed them up for the Care of Magical Creatures elective that year. She had said they needed to get out of the castle more. Plus, Harry had always like learning about the creatures in the Wizarding World.

Hagrid was teaching the class that year. And while Harry wasn’t sure he could trust the man based on how _huge_ of a supporter of Dumbledore he was, he’d always seemed harmless enough.

It was clear that the groundskeeper really did love the animals under his care. Harry could appreciate that.

He could also appreciate, and absolutely _did_ , getting to meet one of those creatures in person. Buckbeak was a hippogriff, and was truly a majestic creature to be so close to.

When the beast took off flying while Harry was on his back, he was frightened for all of two seconds. Then it was just freedom.

Like flying on a broom, but without any of the work or responsibility. His only thought was ‘hang on and have fun.’

And he did. For the whole flight.

But of course, that was ruined once Buckbeak landed back in the clearing. Honestly, he thought the attitude would’ve come from Ron.

But no. It was Malfoy. Harry hadn’t been showing off at all. Buckbeak was the one who decided they were going to fly. But Draco seemed to be offended at the attention Harry was getting.

Clearly, he wasn’t interested in reading the hippogriff’s body language. It was very apparent he didn’t want Draco so close, let alone touching him.

Honestly, it could’ve gone a lot worse. All Buckbeak did was knock the boy down. He didn’t even have a scratch to show for it.

But Draco had never taken embarrassment well before, and this time was no different. He went storming off back to the castle, shouting about how he was going to tell his father all about the dangerous beast they were letting near the students. 

It was a funny thing, trying to see Draco as a Slytherin. To Harry, Tom was the epitome of what he thought a Slytherin should be. Arrogant yes, but also formidable, capable, intelligent, cunning, poised, well-mannered…

Draco might be intelligent and arrogant, but the rest of that seemed to pass him by. Unless running to daddy counted as cunning. But he didn’t think it did.

And then Blaise Zabini sat by Harry in his Divination class. Now there was a Slytherin.

Blaise had the same controlled speech patterns that Tom did. He paid attention to the Professor in class, but was always seemingly aware of everyone else too. He never slouched or got distracted. But he did have a perpetual look of boredom about the whole thing. Like he already knew the subject matter.

Remarkably, he isn’t interested in being lumped in with Malfoy’s gang. He is also one of the two Slytherin boys that were nice to Harry last year after the whole snake thing.

Giving him the same polite courtesy in class wasn’t a hardship. And he was a decent conversationalist. Which is how they learn that everyone thinks Harry is dating Hermione.

She had started using that time turner they’d found in the Room to help Tom look in the big library for information on soul magic, something Harry convinced the other boy to share with her, Fred and George.

Not why exactly, just that he needed to research it.

Harry had even gone so far as to hand over his trunk to Hermione so she could multitask better. He’d rather it was her than him. He didn’t want to think about all the planning that went into time travel.

One of the only times they were able to get a shock out of Blaise was when Hermione had been late getting to their class one day. He was astonished that she had ‘appeared’ out of nowhere. 

They correct the falsehood that they’re dating for Blaise.

Hermione had looked perplexed when Blaise told Harry that his girlfriend was an odd one. “Harry is the closest thing to a sibling I have. That would be disgusting, could you imagine?”

He closed his eyes, scrunching up his nose. “No, and I’d rather we switch to a different topic. I don’t need those mental images.”

But then his face scrunched up for a different reason and turned a nice shade of pink when Blaise immediately proceeded to hit on him. 

A polite way to put it was that Harry was _flustered_. Hermione thought it was hilarious. He turned the boy down as gently as he could and hoped they would still be able to remain ‘friends.’

Blaise took it in stride, honestly not appearing to be offended at the rejection. Besides, now he knew he could make Harry blush.

And Hermione didn’t even offer to save Harry from the teasing. She’d decided Divination was a useless elective and not worth her attention. Blaise thought it was a funny class. And also a crock of shit. So, Harry resigned himself to being embarrassed at least twice a week.

Tom wasn’t amused by Blaise’s forwardness. He could hear what was going on outside of the trunk while he’s in it if he wanted. Usually, he was busy and didn’t want to be distracted with that. But he’d been reading out on the sofa when they’d been in the Divinations class and thus, had heard the whole thing.

“He didn’t mean it,” Harry said with a sigh that first night.

Tom didn’t even look up from his notes, “Of course he did.”

“Well, I wouldn’t have agreed to anything like that anyway, so I don’t see the problem.”

Harry didn’t say anything when Tom held on a little tighter that night. After the first night with the Dementors, Tom hadn’t gone back to his own bed. And Harry didn’t ask him to.

It was nice having someone else there while he fell asleep. It was nice that it was Tom. He was pretty sure Tom liked it too, otherwise why would he stay?

His friend had serious abandonment issues. But he can hear Hermione’s voice in his head ‘ _like you’re any better…’_

Yeah, he’s fine with it. If that’s what Tom needs to feel better then… eh, it’s what he needs. Besides, maybe Harry needed it too. 

Speaking of Dementors…

Professor Lupin, the one from the train with the chocolate... he’d had a brilliant idea to let the students face a boggart in one of his classes.

It was meant to be fun, and some of the fears the others had were amusing. But for Harry… he was sure he would see his uncle, maybe his cousin.

Not quite. When his turn came up, he was caught a bit off guard with the boggart transforming into a Dementor. He hesitated long enough that Professor Lupin stepped in and neutralized the thing. But not before Hermione got a look at the professor’s own fear.

Now why would the man’s biggest fear be the full moon? How unusual.

Hermione offered to take him back to the dorms, knowing how he felt about the wraithlike creatures. But he told her to go on ahead of him, he wanted to talk to Professor Lupin for a few minutes.

“Sir,” he started when the rest of the class had left. “I know that wasn’t a real Dementor, but the one on the train was. I just… I don’t know why I let this one bother me so much. Why it scared me so much when it didn’t really scare the others.”

“Dementors are among the foulest creatures that walk this earth.” Lupin told him, settling down at a desk so they could talk. “They feed on every good feeling, every happy memory, until a person is left with nothing but his worst experiences.

“You’re not weak, Harry. The Dementors affect you most because there are true horrors in your past. Horrors your classmates can scarcely imagine. You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

When Harry asked the man to teach him how to defend himself against the creatures, he agreed. It was almost as an afterthought that he asked to bring the others as well. Having four students who know how to send away the Dementors was better than one.

Make that five. When Blaise found out about the plans he jumped at the chance for some extra tutoring. He may not outwardly show it often, but Harry has seen the boy’s eyes light up at learning ‘new’ things. 

The extra lessons start out with the theory of it, much like the way normal courses are structured. Getting to the actual casting of the charm will take a while.

In the meantime, there’s enough drama to keep them busy.

Ron had decided that Hermione’s new cat had somehow done away with his rat, Scabbers.

Lissy is still a cute little thing, staying in Hermione’s hood and draped over her shoulder. Except for the labs when Hermione puts her robe to the side. Then, Lizzy curls up on whatever table she left it on and waits (sleeps) until they’re done. Honestly, she’s a sweetheart.

Well, she’s sweet to their group of friends. With most other people, she either ignored them entirely or was outright hostile. She’d even taken a swipe at Ron one day when he got too close to Hermione in the halls.

After that, Ron had hated the sight of her and constantly accused her of being evil. The claims of her having done something to his rat are new, but he’s been very loud about it.

None of them have seen his stupid rat, and Lissy doesn’t stray from Hermione’s side. Not even when outside in the courtyard on a nice weekend.

Not that there’s been too many of those. The weather had turned frigid as winter set in. Harry thinks it might have something to do with the fact that there are _Dementors on school grounds._

When the first opportunity to go to Hogsmeade comes up, Harry wasn’t allowed to go. How sad, because trudging through the snow sounds like _such_ a fun idea. Still, it would be nice to have the opportunity, but since he doesn’t have a guardian to sign his permission slip, no dice.

And since he couldn’t go, Hermione refused as well. The twins, however, had been looking forward to ‘scoping out’ Zonko’s Joke Shop all summer. They of course offered to stay behind, but Harry and Hermione catch the forlorn gaze watching the other students leave the castle, so they shoved them off.

They ran across Blaise in the halls soon after that. “Why aren’t you down in Hogsmeade with everyone else?” Harry asked. 

Blaise, who usually looks like everything he does is his own decision gave them a twisted grin. “You need a permission slip signed by a parent, don’t you? Well, that’s a little too pedestrian for my mother’s tastes. She didn’t sign it.”

“We’re staying behind too,” Hermione announced. “Do you want to walk the halls with us? It’s only an hour before lunch and Harry needs the exercise.”

“What?” Harry shot her an offended glare. “No, I don’t. You _just_ said that _you_ wanted to stop being so ‘sedentary’ this year. I’m just coming with you out of the goodness of my heart.”

“Right, your heart has a lot of _goodness_ right now…”

“My heart would have more goodness if you hadn’t implied that I was being lazy.”

“I _never_ implied that. Why? Are you saying I’m the one being lazy?”

Blaise laughed at their argument but cut in before it could go any further. “You’re both beautiful people no matter how _active_ you are. And yes, I would love to accompany you on your walk. Something tells me you’ll need a chaperone.” 

Lupin found the three of them walking the halls once again after lunch and offered to walk them around the outer grounds if they want to join him on a stroll. He’s not going so far as Hogsmeade, but with a staff escort, they can stretch their legs a bit.

It means that Harry didn’t actually escape the snowbanks, but he likes the idea of being safe from the Dementors out in the fresh air beyond the castle walls.

They made it all the way to the bridge over the chasm before Blaise let his curiosity get the better of him. “Look, you can tell me to get lost if you want, but can I ask you something?”

“Alright,” Harry hedged, having no idea where the conversation was going.

“I know what the rumors are… I know all the rumors in this place. But I also know that I don’t see you talking to a lot of other people. Not even from your own house. You don’t sit by them for meals outside of Granger and the Weasley twins. So I don’t think anyone who’s gossiping has first-hand knowledge anyway.”

“Is that your question?”

“No. Last year, there was that message about the Chamber of Secrets, and those people got petrified.”

Harry tensed up, noticing Lupin eying them.

Blaise quickly followed that up with, “Is it still open?”

“How would I know?”

“Did the attacks stop?” The professor asked.

“Yes.”

Lupin nodded, but looked over the three of them with a more discerning gaze. “Then it sounds like the issue corrected itself.”

It wasn’t enough of an answer though, because Blaise blurted out, “What was in Salazar Slytherin’s chamber though?”

Hermione, who had been quiet for most of their walk turned to answer the boy, “Blaise, no one knows what kind of a monster was hiding down there. Harry and I know as much as you do.”

“That’s cute Granger, but that’s not true.”

“Excuse me?” She was a bit touchy that day for some reason. Easy to rile up. 

“Children,” Lupin cautioned. 

Blaise drew himself up straight and proper. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Then how exactly did you mean it? And my name is Hermione. You’ve been coming to the extra lessons with us for long enough that you must have learned my name by now.”

“Hermione, then,” Blaise allowed. “I apologize. I wasn’t trying to accuse you of anything. But you’re smart. Everyone knows you’re smart. That’s why Draco hates you so much. He doesn’t like that a mudblood is smarter than him.”

“Hey!” Harry yelled back, defending his friend.

Professor Lupin agreed, “That is not an appropriate word to use Mister Zabini.”

Blaise gave a nonchalant shrug. “Appropriate or not, it doesn’t matter Professor. I’m one too. Well, a half-blood. But it’s the same thing to them. You can’t get so upset about it. That’s what they want you to do, so don’t let them win.”

Hermione actually took a moment to consider his words before giving a tight nod back.

“Like I was saying,” he continued. “You’re smarter than that. If I could figure out what the monster was, I’m pretty sure you already did too. A basilisk is able to petrify its victims with just a look. And when you think about it… Salazar Slytherin, founder of the house of snakes… with a giant snake as his monster. Come on. Don’t tell me you didn’t put this together. Also, how do you know which direction the chamber is in? You said, ‘down there’ but I don’t think anyone ever determined where it was located.”

She managed her response well, not missing a beat. “It was just a figure of speech. The Slytherin dorms are in the dungeons, it would make sense the house founder’s secret chamber is there too. And we might have thought the same thing on the basilisk.”

That earned her an amused snort. “Nice answer, no real confirmation on any of it. You should go into politics. Look, the attacks stopped. If you two did something to make that happen, then thank you. I’d rather not have to walk around the halls being stalked by a murderous snake for the next four years.”

That got a chuckle from all of them, Professor Lupin included.

“I’m just so curious about what else was in the chamber. And if it’s only the Heir of Slytherin who can open it, then who are they? One of the second years? It would’ve been their first year and that’s when it opened.”

Harry pulled a face. “Can you picture an eleven-year-old opening the Chamber of Secrets? With a basilisk inside?”

“Well, we’re only thirteen,” Blaise pointed out.

But Hermione corrected him, “Fourteen.”

“Really?”

“I have a late birthday,” she said, like it was no big thing. 

“Huh.”

They finally made it across the bridge and into the trees. Not the Forbidden Forest area, but towards the lake where a few open fields were peppered with thin birchwood. Professor Lupin shared about his time as a student at Hogwarts, and how he and his friends often came out this way for relaxing.

One of those friends was Harry’s father. It wasn’t much, but he was able to share more about James Potter than Harry had ever heard before. That was also when they learned he was in school at the same time as Professor Snape.

“Snape doesn’t like you though, does he?”

“We weren’t always the nicest bunch to the Slytherins.”

“Yeah, no change there,” Blaise grunted, but he didn’t sound like he was holding the man accountable for any real animosity.

While Blaise was scouting ahead on the trail with Harry, both boys excited enough to do some exploring, Hermione hung back with their professor.

“Sir, I was hoping you wouldn’t think this was too forward, but if you don’t mind could you… I mean, I would understand if you don’t want to, but-”

“What’s on your mind Ms. Granger?”

She realized too late that she was twisting her hands together and quickly put them down at her side before continuing. “It’s just… we know you’re a werewolf. Harry and me, I mean. Not Blaise.”

“I see.” He was a lot calmer than she thought he’d be. “If you’re concerned about the full moons, be assured there is a potion that I take each month to stave off the effects of my… other side.”

“Well, that’s just the thing. We looked over the aconite potion that Snape showed us. We even brewed it. But… Sir, I just don’t see how it’s safe for you to be taking that.”

Truth be told, it was Tom who had the concerns. He’d said that introducing aconite into a werewolf’s system was harmful no matter how it was brewed.

“There isn’t an alternative, I’m afraid. Creature rights aren’t something most witches and wizards care about. Headmaster Dumbledore was kind enough to offer me this teaching post when many others would never have allowed it. But it comes with the condition that certain safeguards are in place.”

She wasn’t happy to hear that, but it just made her more determined to make him the offer. “We do care though. We’re working on a new potion. Of course, it’ll go through Professor Snape first. But it might be able to help you without the side-effects.”

“You really are the brightest witch of your time.” Whether he believed her or not, he gave her a friendly smile.

Even if he was just humoring her, she still enjoyed the praise and added, “I know some wizards who’re pretty smart too.”

They stayed outside for longer than they thought they would, using the time to learn warming charms from Professor Lupin. It was a nice extra lesson that they didn’t know they’d be getting. But they were back in by dinner, laughing with Fred and George about the things they’d seen down in the shops.

The next Hogsmeade weekend happened over the Christmas break. Harry, taking advantage of having most of the students gone, used his invisibility cloak to sneak him and Blaise out.

It was the first time Blaise had seen the cloak, and to say he was impressed was an understatement. But then, his shock was doubled when the twins handed over the marauders map. It showed everyone in the castle, whether they were walking around or standing in one place.

They could spend hours studying it, or they could use it to sneak out. Harry made the decision to go with the latter and only opened it wide enough to ensure a clear path until they were free of the grounds and on their wait to meet Hermione, Fred, and George in the town.

The upper year students who’d stayed over Christmas were milling about the town center, as were some of the locals. It wasn’t like there were huge crowds to hide in, but they also had a lower risk of being spotted by the ones who were there.

Harry hadn’t been there before, neither had Hermione. Blaise said he hadn’t either, but he didn’t really sound sincere about it. They got to see the shops, and the taverns. It was a snowy little village. Cute, but still an average village.

The thing that put it on the map was its close proximity to Hogwarts, rather than anything to make it truly spectacular. 

They had one near miss when Fred spotted Professor McGonagall. And then Blaise whispered over that the man with her was none other than Minister Fudge.

But why would the Minister of Magic be in Hogsmeade?

For however much Harry denied his Gryffindor leanings, he still had more than a touch of curiosity and recklessness to him sometimes. Before anyone could stop him, he quickly put his cloak back on and followed the two adults into a quiet, out of the way tavern.

Sirius Black.

Yet again, that man’s name came up in hushed conversation. This time, it was from the Minister himself, not dorm room gossip. He already knew Black had betrayed his parents. That wasn’t new information. It doesn’t make him any happier to hear it now than it did before. But this time there’s a new name thrown in the mix.

Peter Pettigrew. He had been his parents’ friend and Sirius had killed him the same night.

Who exactly was Peter Pettigrew? And why was he important enough for Professor McGonagall to mention?

“No Harry,” Fred told him when he recounted the conversation on their walk back to the school. “Peter Pettigrew is here. We’ve seen his name on the map before.”

“What?”

“Yeah, he was always following Ron around,” George added. “We thought he was another student. But if he’s your parents’ age, then I just don’t see how that’s possible.”

Harry looked perplexed. “So my godfather killed Peter, sold out my parents, killed a bunch of muggles, and has now escaped from Azkaban prison… someone should write a book about this, it’s absurd.”

“The Adventures of Harry Potter?” Blaise joked.

“The Escapades of the Boy Who Lived!” George threw out, joining in on the laughter.

Harry rolled his eyes but offered, “Yeah, they can make a chapter on Dark Lords. Maybe one on Lockhart, that man needs his own chapter. And now they can put one in there on ghosts following your brother around on the map.”

Fred didn’t laugh at that though. “Harry, the map doesn’t show ghosts. If it did, the pages would be crawling with them. Everyone on that map is alive.”

“Then how is someone who’s dead on there?” Hermione asked. “Let me see it.”

They decided to wait until they were safely back inside before pulling it out again. Besides, dinner would be served before too long, and they were all mostly hungry enough to want to get back sooner rather than later.

Right before Christmas, Fred and George went back down to Hogsmeade, claiming they had some last minute shopping to do. Harry and Hermione told them not to worry about presents; them being there is enough. But they insisted.

Blaise had actually been given authorization to use the floo network to travel to his friend, Theodore’s home for the rest of the break. But had he stayed, they had agreed to spend the holiday with him. It hadn’t been too long that they’d been friends with him, but he seemed to fit in well.

They would have to see about the vow though. Especially if they planned to introduce him to Tom. Or even show him the trunk. Or the Room.

On the actual day of Christmas, the four of them trudged out of their dorm still in slippers and comfy clothes. They had dressing robes of course, but they weren’t in formal wear or anything. Once they made it up to the Room of Requirement, opened to a grand drawing room with a big fireplace and plenty of plush seating next to a giant Christmas tree, Harry brought Tom up to enjoy the celebrations together.

Fred and George quickly brought their own present out, the one they’d gone back to Hogsmeade to retrieve.

Except it wasn’t a thing, it was a person. Jasper.

And honestly, that was one of the best presents Harry could’ve gotten. The twins had picked him up in town and smuggled his trunk (with him inside) into the castle. 

He has to head back before Christmas break is over. But he’s there long enough that they get to show him the Room of Hidden Things and the Great Library.

And no, he had no idea about the room when he was in school.

Hermione shows him the time turner. And a few of the other treasures they’ve found. There’s a quill that duplicates notes, a lunascope, and quite a bit of jewelry to name just a few.

He left before the new year, not having _that_ much time off work. But it was good to spend a week with him since they were gone for so much of the year normally.

Also, Happy Birthday Tom. On the last day of the year, Tom turned seventeen. Harry got him a rich black cloak with a deep green silk lining and a silver clasp designed as two snakes. He was happy he’d been able to keep it a secret for as long as he did.

Once classes were back in session, and Blaise had returned, he helpfully reminded them about the name on the map. 

Hermione hijacked one of their extra practice lessons with Professor Lupin to ask about the name. It was a risk exposing the map, and Lupin was very upset about that, but he said no; Peter has been dead for years.

He told them his version of events, which lined up with what Harry had overheard from McGonagall and the Minister down in the tavern.

Hermione called bullshit.

Blaise agreed. “Look at the map again Sir. If he’s in the castle, he’ll be on there. We’ve seen him but then when we looked, there was no one there.”

Professor Lupin told them that if there are strange things happening, if they start to feel like someone’s following one of them, any large dogs perhaps…

Blaise cut him off with a huff, “Snape gave a lecture at the start of the term on werewolves and animagus. Really, I don’t know why all of the professors here are so cryptic about everything. If you want us to know something, just tell us. Professor Snape spent the whole first week on werewolves. Obviously, he wanted us to know you were one, but he didn’t come out and just say it.”

Hermione cringed at the look of shock on the older man’s face. “Sir, I never said anything.”

“It’s quite alright,” he assured her, before turning back to Blaise. “I don’t know that Professor Snape believed many would make the connection. Though it wasn’t myself I was referring to. I take it you are familiar with the term animag-”

Blaise held his breath when he cut off mid-sentence.

“Oh my word… he was a rat.”

“What?” Harry asked, totally confused. Along with the rest of them.

“In school, your father, Sirius, and Peter all became animagi. It’s where a witch or wizard is able to transform themselves into an animal.”

“Professor McGonagall showed us that back in year one.” Hermione stated.

Lupin paid her no mind. “The form Peter Pettigrew took was that of a rat. It’s entirely possible that if he _is_ alive and in this castle somewhere, he’s taken the form of a rat to avoid detection.”

Blaise looked fascinated. “So, he’s still alive.”

George nodded, agreeing with Blaise. “But if he’s alive, then that means Sirius never killed him.”

“Then he’s innocent?” Fred asked.

Lupin shook his head, but he was still staring off into nothing, seeing things that none of the rest of them could, “Not necessarily. A good number of muggles died that night too. That’s why he was sent to Azkaban. Come along, all of you.”

“Where are we going?”

He barely broke stride to answer, “To see Snape.”

“He’ll still be in the great hall.” Hermione pointed out, practically jogging to keep up with his long strides.

Professor Lupin kept Blaise with him when he entered the great hall. The rest of them had stayed outside of the main doors so as not to arouse suspicion. But Lupin walked up to the staff table with one hand on the Slytherin student’s arm, as though he was looking to speak to the boy’s Head of House.

When Professor Snape made it out of the doors, he looked over their group and came to the realization that he’d been led away on false pretenses. “What is the meaning of this?”

“Not here Severus, we need to take this somewhere private.”

Private meaning the dungeons. They went down to the labs where Lupin quickly picked a table for them to huddle around.

He pulled the map out of his pocket and began explaining, “Earlier tonight, the children came to me with this map to alert me to a name on here that shouldn’t be possible. Peter Pettigrew is somewhere in this castle.”

Snape is completely taken aback by the writing on the front of the map, and then again when it was activated to show the layout of the castle. “Moony… That was your name.”

“Bit on the nose with that one,” George joked.

Lupin grinned back, “So it was. I created this map with Harry’s father and our friends. One of those friends, Wormtail, was Peter Pettigrew. He was supposed to be dead. Betrayed and murdered by Sirius just like Lily and James. But that is evidently _not_ reality. If Peter is alive, we need to find him and question him. We need to know the truth of what happened that night.”

Snape sneered at the man, but hunched over the map regardless, smoothing out the corners for an unobstructed view. “And this wouldn’t be you trying to get your boyfriend free of his criminal status?”

Harry cocked his head in Hermione’s direction and mouthed the word, “ _Boyfriend?”_

She didn’t respond.

“This has nothing to do with that.” Lupin dismissed the implication. “I _knew_ Sirius. James was a brother to him. It was hard to accept what he’d done. But I will… if that is actually what happened.” 

“Hmmm... indeed.” But Snape had already begun scouring the paper for the name Pettigrew. Once they locate him in the halls, the potions professor dismissed the children.

“The five of you, return to your dorms and tell no one about this. Zabini? I’m surprised to see you consorting with this lot. Whatever secrets they’ve been keeping amongst themselves, if they have chosen to include you then I suspect you would do well to keep them to yourself and not hand them out to the rest of your peers the way you do with every other bit of gossip in this castle.”

“Yes, Sir,” Blaise responded with the utmost respect.

George turned to his brother and loudly whispered, “Did Snape just give us permission to be deviants?”

“That’s what I heard.”

“Huh.”

The two adults in the room didn’t give the map back. But they heard Snape order Lupin to keep an eye on the name while he rummaged around on the shelves.

Peter Pettigrew was not in fact caught that night. He must be getting around in the walls.

And they still didn’t get the map back.

A fact that made George and Fred most unhappy. At least that was true until they managed to cast their first patronus charm under Professor Lupin’s tutelage. They all managed it eventually, though some were better than others.

Blaise asked them permission to invite a couple more people. Not that they were interested in adding many more to their ranks, but they liked Blaise, so it wasn’t too big of a request. Plus, did they really have the right to prevent more students from learning protective magic?

No, decidedly not.

He collected Theodore Nott and Luna Lovegood for their next session. Nott was the other Slytherin that was kind to Harry after the whole parselmouth thing. And he’d been the one to tell him about the raids being real, as it was his grandfather’s estate that was hit at least once a year.

As for Luna, she was Nott’s cousin. Although their families split a long time ago, Theodore had made an effort to get to know her when she started the year behind them at Hogwarts.

Considering most of the other Ravenclaws think she’s _odd_ , she seemed happy enough to accept his friendship. And with him came Blaise.

Blaise said he just has a good feeling about her.

“That’s because you see things the same as I do.”

“I don’t think anyone sees things the way you do, Luna,” he denied.

“You do. You just don’t know it yet.”

He shrugged, but turned back to the others with a smile. “Yeah, she’s weird but we like her.”

Harry wasn’t sure if she was pretending not to hear that, or if she honestly wasn’t insulted by it. But she didn’t react either way.

Both of them were pretty quiet. They talked a little bit when they were engaged, for sure. But it wasn’t unusual for them to go over an hour with the only words coming out of their mouths being the spells and charms they were practicing.

They liked the two new additions enough for extra practice with Professor Lupin. But none of them were ready to bring them into their full confidence. Not even Blaise knew everything yet.

Even so, they’re little group of four became a typical band of seven in the second half of the school year.

With the patronus charm in their back pocket, so to speak, Harry felt a bit better about venturing back out on the weekends. They didn’t stray from the grounds, but they did start taking wider paths around the castle.

It was on one of those strolls, that they ran into Hagrid. The man was absolutely distraught when they found him, though he was very clearly trying to put on a brave face. It took hardly any prodding at all to learn that Buckbeak, the Hippogriff that took Harry flying had been sentenced to die.

“Yeah, Draco was bragging about that after Christmas,” Blaise told them. “I guess daddy went to some people in the Ministry.”

Theo nodded along. “He said it was Dumbledore’s fault for allowing it in the first place. I guess it came down to the wizard or the creature. Unsurprisingly, they spared the wizard.”

Out of all of them, Luna was the most compassionate with the giant man. “He’ll be okay, Mr. Hagrid. Don’t worry.”

Likely, he didn’t believe her. But he smiled at her kindness just the same before telling them they’ll need to be off soon. It’s no good business to have them seeing the execution.

“Just one more thing before you go,” he said before reaching inside his door and pulling out a little flour tin. “Tell that brother of yers he needs to be keepin’ a closer eye on ‘is pets.” 

Hagrid handed off a very familiar looking rat to George, and shooed them all on their way. Nott and Luna didn’t know exactly why the rest of them were looking at the rat like it was an oasis in a desert, but neither of them questioned it either.

Nor did they question the speed of the others as they raced back up the hill to the castle.

They needed to get that rat to Lupin or Snape immediately. But just as they were turning the corner into the courtyard they ran into three very familiar bodies.

Ron, Dean, and Seamus weren’t happy about being nearly bowled over by their group and certainly let them know it. Loudly.

At this point, Harry was convinced Ron couldn’t really do much of anything if it wasn’t done loudly.

They really didn’t have the time to be waylaid by the trio, but it seemed the younger Weasley brother was going to take the chance encounter as another opportunity to convince Harry to spend more time with him and his friends.

Not that Harry currently spent _any_ time with Ron and his friends.

It was a wonder the boy didn’t realize that insulting the people Harry actually _did_ consider friends wasn’t going to endear him to the idea. And sure enough, Ron started doing just that.

He tried to persuade Harry to not hang around with a Slytherin (that was a new justification since Blaise had started joining them in their usual hang outs) and Hermione, given that her cat ate his rat. He even accused his brothers of betraying their family.

A bit dramatic, really. 

Unfortunately when Ron started in on his brothers, he also noticed what exactly George was holding.

“Scabbers!” He lunged for the rat, angrier than he was before. “Just what are you trying to do? You’ve had him this whole time? What have you done to him!? You wait till mum hears of this. Give him back!”

George danced away as quick as he could with Fred trying to push Ron off. After a particularly good shove, where Ron fell back into his friends, they could tell his embarrassment was growing alongside his failure.

They weren’t, however, willing to actually hurt their brother. So when he tried again, with Seamus and Dean backing him up, he actually succeeded in grabbing his rat from George.

He crowed in victory, yelling about how sorry they would be when he told their mother about stealing his rat in the first place, and probably torturing it too.

“No one tortured your rat,” Blaise sighed out, looking down his nose at the three Gryffindors.

Which was absolutely the wrong thing to do if he wanted a calm situation.

And that was when Ron zeroed in on the Slytherins amongst them. “So, this is who you hang around now. Does mum know you’re friends with Death Eater scum?”

Nott didn’t respond to the vitriol. But it didn’t matter because Ron kept going. “And that one. His mother’s always in the Prophet with a new boyfriend every year. I bet you don’t even know who your father is. Guess that makes you a bastard, doesn’t it?”

“That’s enough, Ron,” Fred ordered. Even if Blaise wasn’t going to acknowledge the insults, Fred wasn’t about to let his brother continue to call the boy names. 

Ron ignored him though, completely focused on Blaise. “Yeah, a bastard who’s just like his mother. How many of the girls in this school have you dated so far?”

“More than a few,” Blaise answered proudly, breaking his silence. “And some of the guys too.”

That seemed to throw the redhead for a loop, but he came back quick enough with a face full of disgust, “You’re a dirty pervert is what you are! It’s unnatural!”

Hermione punched Ron for that.

She’d heard more than enough of his mouth for a lifetime, let alone one evening.

He went reeling back in shock, probably never having been hit before. But it did get him to drop the rat, who then started to scurry away from the castle.

Fred, George, and Harry immediately gave chase, which caused Ron to detach from his friends who were trying to pull him away.

Dean and Seamus went running back in the castle, but Ron tore off after his brothers.

Hermione gave one look to the two Slytherins and Luna before they all came to some sort of silent agreement that they would also be chasing after the escaped rat.

Fred caught up to him just as they arrived, but it wasn’t for long as the rat bit his finger and fell to the ground again.

None of them really looked up from their race to get the slippery rodent, but eventually they ended up on the complete opposite side of the castle. When Fred again trapped the rat, this time wrapping it in his jumper, they thought all they would have to deal with would be getting rid of Ron.

Things could never be that simple though.

A low growling sound broke through any chatter they had going, all of them turning on cue to stare at the outcropping of nearby rocks and the dirty, snarling dog bearing down on them.

Ron instantly took off for safety. Nott and Blaise quickly shielded Luna with their bodies. And the rest of them froze, half in fear and half in indecision. Harry had his wand out, but everything happened so fast. The dog didn’t even bother with the rest of them, just grabbed onto Fred’s leg and dragged him under the Whomping Willow tree.

How had they not realized they were so close to such a dangerous tree. Almost as if it was just now waking up to the ruckus, the giant limbs of the willow started to sway, and then slammed down onto the ground around them.

They needed to get Fred back. But they also needed to survive the damn tree.

“Blaise, take them out of here,” Harry shouted. The three new additions to their group had already backed away when the tree started getting active “Go get the professors.”

As they raced off, George, Hermione, and Harry slipped through the willow’s defenses and followed Fred into the tunnels.

The tunnels that had a staircase in them. They could hear shouting up ahead and ran toward it, coming out of the ground inside an old, dilapidated building.

They found Fred up some more stairs on a landing, his hand clutching his ankle, clearly an injury from being dragged around by the dog’s teeth. George was by his side in seconds helping to check the wound.

“It’s okay,” George whispered. “It’s okay. Can you move it?”

Fred wasn’t relaxed, even with them there, it hurt too much. “I can move it, but it’s deep cuts. At least it’s still attached, right?”

It wasn’t too bad, all things considered. It would need to be seen to by a healer, but it could’ve been a lot worse.

Harry followed the dusty paw prints leading away from Fred towards one of the rooms.

“Harry don-” Hermione called after him, but he didn’t wait. She helped George get his brother up and hobbling after Harry.

There in the far corner was the huddled dog from before. But it wasn’t a dog.

Despite being filthy and half covered by greasy, matted hair, they clearly recognized the Azkaban escapee, Sirius Black.

The madman who’d betrayed his parents to Lord Voldemort.

Or had he…

Harry had his wand out, but he kept it at his side. “You’re Sirius Black.”

“Harry…” the man rasped.

“Are you here to kill me?”

The question itself looked like it was hurting the man. Or he could just be reacting to transforming from a dog. Harry wasn’t an animagus, he had no idea if it was painful.

“Not you,” Sirius swore. “Never you. P-Peter. Pettigrew… he’s… he’s the ra-”

“The rat, yes we know,” Harry interrupted. “They said you killed him the same night you told Voldemort where to find my parents.”

“I never!”

“I know.” Harry put his wand away, raising both hands in front of him hoping to keep the man calm. He may not be a murderer, but he clearly wasn’t working with a full deck of cards at that moment. “I know that. It was him, wasn’t it? Peter. He’s the one who betrayed my parents.”

“That’s right, Harry,” a new voice called from the door.

“Remus…” Sirius whispered, losing a bit of his balance.

Professor Lupin rushed across the room, helping to prop the man up. “Looking a bit ragged there, aren’t you?”

Sirius didn’t answer with words, but he did bury his face into Lupin’s chest, letting out a grief filled, mournful howl of a groan.

Blaise had come back with the professor and entered the room as well, taking up a spot very close behind Harry. He gave a nudge to announce his presence, but his eyes never left the new player in the room. And his wand stayed very noticeably in his hand.

A scuttle on the other side of the room caught everyone’s attention and Sirius went absolutely nuts. He grabbed the wand from Lupin and started casting at the rat who was attempting to flee.

Harry would’ve left him to it, but right at that moment, Lissy got the bright idea to enter the fray.

She jumped down from Hermione’s cloak and darted after the rodent. He was quick, but she was faster. She dodged the curses from Sirius’s stolen wand but never lost sight of her quarry.

Hermione and Harry rushed to get Sirius to stop endangering her familiar, Blaise joined in with that. But even with Lupin’s help, the man was a mad swirling dervish of motion.

And then entered Professor Snape. He caught sight of the activity, but stopped to look over Fred’s injury first. He could get the bleeding to stop, but the boy would need to see the medi-witch.

He also brought with him a charmed rat cage.

“Ah, Severus. Mr. Nott found you then?” Lupin called from the floor. It turned out that the only way to stop Sirius had been to actually tackle him to the ground and lay on him. Blaise had helpfully grabbed the man’s wand back while Harry and the professor kept him pinned.

“Indeed. And it seems I owe him an apology. I accused him of being dramatic when he said a dog had tried to eat the Weasley boy.” He looked at Sirius as they let the man up from the floor. “Were you trying to gnaw his foot off? If those lacerations went any deeper that might have been the case.”

“I just wanted the rat!” Sirius threw back.

Speaking of the rat, it was currently dangling and twitching in Lissy’s mouth.

Sirius turned half mad ( _yet again_ ), shrieking in rage, but they convinced him it was better to turn the rat over to Snape and the charmed little prison.

“Smart cat,” the potions master told Hermione as he locked the tiny door once the prize was inside. 

She smiled back, picking Lissy up and setting her back on her shoulder. “Thank you, Sir. She was taught how to hunt by a snake.”

It’s true enough. Tom would sometimes conjure phantom mice for Keziah and Lissy to hunt around the house.

They got real food too. But it was an easy way to keep the kitten occupied and entertained. She’d started off by watching Keziah going after them, and soon enough started stalking the little mice alongside him.

“I’m sure. Lupin, get him out of here.”

How interesting that he was letting Sirius go. Harry hadn’t seen that coming.

He also hadn’t realized that the night sky they would be walking out into had a giant full moon looming overhead. Snape managed to put himself in front of all five children as Lupin started to struggle with fighting off his werewolf side.

But he probably didn’t count on Hermione pushing past him and marching over to Lupin and Sirius.

She nudged Sirius away and reached into her beaded bag for a vial of shimmering liquid. “Professor, take this. It’s the new one we talked about. It’ll stop the change.”

It hadn’t been tested, so there was definitely still a risk. But she had confidence in the brew. It’s really Tom’s potion, and she had even more confidence in _his_ brew.

While it did in fact keep the transformation at bay, it had the unfortunate side effect of sending Lupin into a near sleeping state very quickly. He was somewhat awake, but it was more like he was sleepwalking. No coordination of limbs really, and his words were slurred and mostly unintelligible.

And that left the escape of Sirius to the rest of them.

Except they had two injured parties. George and Snape were able to help get Lupin back in the castle, while giving Fred a shoulder to lean on as a crutch. Hermione carried the rat cage, with Lissy staring hungrily down at its occupant. 

That left Harry and Blaise to help get Sirius to the Forbidden Forest and away from the school grounds.

They made it about a hundred yards into the trees before trouble found them once again.

Dementors.

Because of course there were Dementors.

They ran like their lives were depending on it, because as far as they knew… they were. Blaise took a tumble down a steep bank, causing both Sirius and Harry to double back for him.

Which killed any chances of them getting away. Blaise had actually hit his head pretty hard on the fall and was knocked out, but that didn’t stop the swarm of Dementors from going after him. Along with their attacks on Harry and Sirius.

It was exactly like the time on the train. He knew now what to expect, but that didn’t make it any easier, or better. He tried the patronus charm, but couldn’t get it out before another Dementor was there. And then another, and another, and another.

And then, right as he felt his eyes closing, the blinding light of a massive patronus was hurtling towards them. He didn’t know who it was, but he was grateful as he was able to take a breath for the first time in what felt like forever.

That one moment of safety lulled him into relaxing, and before he knew it, he was passed out next to Blaise and Sirius.

He didn’t wake up again until he was in the hospital wing. Though how exactly he got there, he couldn’t say.

Snape was there with Fred, George, and Hermione. Blaise was still out in one of the beds across from them. Luna and Nott were by their friend, though they were watching Harry with concern as well.

He learned from Snape that Sirius was cleared of the murder of Peter. “But there are still the murders of the muggles to contend with. Until Pettigrew can go to trial, Sirius has been taken back into custody.”

“Back to Azkaban, you mean.”

Snape actually had a split-second expression of regret on his face. “Yes.”

“But he didn’t do anything!” Harry insisted.

“The Ministry won’t believe that without a trial. The public won’t either.” Snape again looked like he was sorry about it for a moment. It meant a lot, considering Lupin had admitted they weren’t nice to the Slytherins when they were students.

Plus, Snape had actually told the other professor to make Sirius disappear instead of turning him in before. So Harry figured that if the man could have done something, he already would have.

Luna waited until Snape left, but once he did, she ran for Hermione. Honestly, they weren’t that far apart. She just walked really fast.

But she grabbed the gold chain around Hermione’s neck, pulling the time turner out and giving her the most innocent smile, “You could save him, you know.”

“Luna, what are you talking about?” Nott called over. Blaise was still asleep, but he still stayed by his housemate’s side.

“Hermione can go back,” Luna answered, just as sweetly as before. “She can keep the Ministry from ever finding Sirius. He doesn’t deserve to go back to prison. He won’t survive this time.”

“Hermione, you have to,” Harry pleaded.

She didn’t really need to be sold on it. Still, if Harry thought he was getting out of doing the heavy lifting… “You mean, _we_ have to.”

He rolled his eyes but stepped closer to her anyway. “Fine. We. How long was I out? We need to go back to before the Dementors got us.”

And that led to him explaining everything he remembered from the Dementor attack. There had been a mystery person added in there who used a patronus charm.

“If we can go back to that point, I can use the cloak to hide Sirius.”

Hermione gave him a wide-eyed look and nodded over to Nott and Luna. She whispered to Harry, “Where’s the cloak though?”

The cloak was in the trunk. Which was in his pocket. He’d have to open the trunk to get it. And there were new eyes in the room.

What’s life without a few risks?

Even as he was doing it though, he felt the tingles of a distant fear creep closer. It definitely wasn’t comfortable letting new people see one of his secrets. 

But he pulled the trunk out just the same. Pointedly _not_ looking across the room at Nott and Luna, he enlarged it so he could go down and get his invisibility cloak from his study. 

As soon as he was there though, Tom came sweeping out of the study. “It’s late, where’ve you been?”

He looked concerned, but also a little angry. Tom didn’t like not knowing things. And with the fact that they were in Hogwarts, a place that was the opposite of safe in his mind, Tom really didn’t like surprises to the normal schedule they had meted out.

Knowing that, and knowing they were short on time, Harry went to stand in front of the other boy and simply said, “Read me.”

When the subject was at all unwilling, Tom needed the spoken legilimens command to look inside someone’s mind. But when it was like this, where Harry was all but throwing his memories out to him, it was as easy as breathing for him to gently sift through them all.

Tom’s hands never relaxed from their grip on Harry’s arms during the session, and at times he even tightened his grasp. The moment with the Dementors on the bank was one of those. But by the time he was done, which was really only less than a few minutes, he turned back into the library for the cloak.

“Make sure you stay hidden. Don’t be seen by anyone, even yourself.” He pulled Harry in for a quick hug. “And tell Hermione to take care with that time turner. Try not to go back too far.”

“I will. We will,” Harry assured him before darting back out of the trunk.

He came up into the room where Hermione and George were keeping Nott and Luna’s curiosity down. Well, mostly Nott’s.

Luna did have an interested tilt to her head, but somehow, she always just _knew_ things. He didn’t think this one would prove to be an exception. 

Case in point: “Three turns instead of one.”

“What?” Harry asked.

“Hermione should turn it three times. You can save Hagrid’s friend too.”

Well, that would certainly make things trickier. But they had the cloak. They could sneak back to the little hut and get rid of the chains on the hippogriff.

Sure.

They heard a surprised gasp behind them when the cloak went up. Harry almost felt bad for leaving Fred and George behind to make excuses to Nott. Almost.

They succeeded in half of their plan. The first part where they saved Buckbeak. Leading him away had been a bit of a struggle in the beginning, but they were encouraged when they discovered he would follow the food.

Hermione was given the task of feeding him the dead rodents to keep him moving. She wasn’t happy about it.

They found the same lake the Dementors would be swarming later and waited. And waited. And waited.

Finally, Harry, Blaise, and Sirius came into view. And the Dementors showed up just like last time. But the mystery person who would cast the charm was cutting it a bit close.

Those Dementors were going to kill the three bodies on the other bank.

“Harry, it was us,” Hermione murmured over. “We’re the ones who cast the patronus, you _know_ I’m right. No one else is coming.”

He did know. It had to have been them. But he wasn’t strong enough to do it the first time. Would he really be strong enough now?

“Harry, now.”

And just like that he realized… If he’d seen the patronus before, and it had worked… then it would work again. “Expecto Patronum!” He shouted from across the lake.

Through the flares of the blinding light, he watched as Dementor after Dementor was hurled away from the three unconscious figures. And then back, back, back away from the forest, and up into the sky.

They raced around the lake, crashing down next to the two boys. They were both breathing, but were absolutely passed out. So was Sirius.

“Come on,” he told Hermione. “The others will be coming for them, we have to get Sirius out of here.”

Buckbeak graciously allowed them to use him as a mule for the surprisingly heavy escapee. And then it was simply a matter of keeping out of sight until their time was up.

Sirius did wake up before that happened, though. It took a few minutes, but they brought him up to speed on the events of the night.

And that he couldn’t allow the Ministry to take him again.

“Your friend Luna, she’s a seer.” He told them.

“Ummm…” Harry didn’t want to say no, cause her predictions were suspiciously accurate. But he knew how Hermione felt about that subject.

“Divinations is rubbish, it’s not real,” she declared. Confirming Harry’s take on her standing with it all.

Sirius was still curled inward mostly, still shaking. But he offered an alternate way of looking at it. “The class with the tea leaves and crystal balls? Yes. But a true seer, those have always been around. They’re rare though. It’s a bloodline trait, passed down in families. Look into the girl’s family, you’ll find more of them.”

The only family they knew of for her was Nott. Maybe he was one if she was one. Maybe not. They didn’t really know either of them well enough to say. But it had caught Hermione’s attention.

Harry could just see the research sessions already. He was already tired thinking about it.

But then, before they were ready, she announced that, “It’s time.”

Harry walked with Sirius back over to Buckbeak. They would both need to flee. One was wanted for the executioner; one was wanted for Azkaban.

Although the way Luna told it, both would have gotten a death sentence.

“Harry, I need…” Sirius started. “I’m not well at the moment. I need to see if I can fix that. But your parents, they gave me one of the greatest honors before they died. They made me your godfather.”

He smiled up at the man, “I know.”

“Then if it would be alright with you… Once I’m me again, and only if you want of course… but I would like it if we could get to know each other?”

He didn’t need to think twice about it. Sirius might be half crazy, but he’d been tortured for over a decade. Harry thought he was holding up remarkably well for that. “You can write to me. Whenever you want. The letters are private, no one will find them… I want you to write me. Even if it’s just to tell me if you’re okay.”

“Harry, we don’t have much time,” Hermione reminded them.

“I will,” Sirius promised. “As soon as we get somewhere safe, I’ll send you a letter.”

And with that he was off. Buckbeak again offered his back and gave Harry a final nudge before turning for the open sky and flying out towards the moon.

Harry and Hermione watched for all of thirty seconds before she grabbed his sleeve and wrenched him away from the spot. They were far enough from their original starting point that they needed to _run_ to make it back in time.

The cloak helped though. They didn’t notice anyone on their journey, but if there had been, they wouldn’t have seen the two third-years tearing down the corridors.

The funniest part was that George and Fred had barely started explaining things to Nott when they came back through the doors. For all the other boy knew, the two of them had put on an invisibility cloak and simply walked to the other side of the room.

The fact that they were out of breath notwithstanding.

They would learn over the next few days that Peter Pettigrew’s transport to the Ministry was unsuccessful. How exactly a rat in a charmed cage went about escaping from two highly trained Aurors was anybody’s guess.

Lupin was suspicious of the escape. But Snape… he was furious. They discovered all of that during the detention they’d all earned for being out of the castle after curfew.

Two weeks with Snape, two weeks with Lupin.

More than a few times the two professors shared the detention together as they were working on the new brew Hermione had introduced. She wouldn’t say who her friend was, but she did share some notes that Snape seemed particularly interested in.

A brew for werewolves that didn’t include aconite. He didn’t think such a thing was possible. But if it was (and it _was_ because it had already worked once), then Lupin’s body could be free of toxins for the first time since he was a child.

It was worth the month spent in detention.

The month of focused study was also good to get them on track for their exams coming up. Blaise and Nott caught on to the fact that Hermione and Harry were actually studying a different potions curriculum.

Snape told the two Slytherins not to give it too much thought. And they actually listened. But they weren’t stupid, either of them. That knowledge would be stored away until later. Until it helped make up a whole picture of the two Gryffindors.

Happily enough, all _four_ Gryffindors earned O’s on their potions exam. Which meant more books for the summer. Blaise laughed at Harry’s face when he was handed the new stack.

Hermione was excited, and Harry was too a little, but they had things to get done this summer that weren’t brewing potions. Still, this would help them be prepared for when they were done with school, so he supposed it was necessary. 

Blaise told them not to bother trying to include him in that accelerated stuff, he’s rubbish at potions. 

On a less than happy note: Professor Lupin let them know that he would not be returning for the next year. Word didn’t get out about him being a werewolf, but he’s still leaving.

Hermione and Harry gathered Fred and George to visit him before they all left. They gave him six months’ worth of the potion that will help him through the full moons, which was what they had independently brewed. Snape had already given some to the man himself.

He gave them a gift in return. Or rather, he gave Fred and George the gift. The map. Harry swore there were tears in George’s eyes when he held it again.

As they were saying their goodbyes, the classroom door creaked open and they were interrupted by Blaise, Nott and Luna.

They knew he was leaving too and wanted to send him off with a cheerful goodbye.

Nott gave Lupin a card for contacting his grandfather, along with a sealed envelope from the man. “My grandfather has never looked poorly on werewolves, Sir. Or any wizard with creature blood. He would be happy to help you find employment if you need it.”

Lupin pocketed both the card and envelope, sending a polite thank you to the young man.

Harry smiled with the others as the suitcases were all packed up and stowed away. But before the man actually left, he moved in closer to say a private goodbye.

“Tell Sirius I said hi.” Harry waited as the man feigned ignorance and then finally gave a nod back. “I know about dementor sickness, we’re going to brew him something to help with that. Just don’t tell anyone, I think it’s illegal actually.” 

That last bit received a look of admonishment, “Harry, you children don’t need to be risking yourselves for this. Between me and Snape, we’ll find the right brew for him.”

“It’s hardly a risk if you don’t tell anyone Professor. And we want to.”

He chuckled at the response before grinning down at Harry and informing him that, “You get that cheek from your mother by the way. She was always willing to bend the rules if a friend needed it.”

And then it was goodbye for real.

Goodbye to their third year at Hogwarts too. They had things to do that summer, that was true. But they had also made three new friends that year. The walk down to Hogsmeade station saw the seven of them forming their own group of travelers as they talked in excited tones about all the plans they would make.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look, I totally get there is a difference between cell phones from today, and the ones that were available in 1993-94. I have taken creative liberties with this. And I’m not saying they have smart phones, but I decided to give them products that are at least ten years into the future. Remember the little Motorola Razr flip phone? Like that…


End file.
